Tara Brach - Part 2 - From Human Doing to Human Being (2018-07-11)

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

From Human Doing to Human Being (2018-07-11) - Like Sisyphus eternally pushing the boulder up the hill, we can spend many moments busily trying to manage our life. This two-part talk explores how we can awaken from our non-stop doing, including the incessant inner narrative, and discover the mystery, love and freedom that arises in Being. 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. Some of you might remember about a month and a half ago, I did part one of a series and it got left dangling. It was a series called Liberating Sisyphus, you know, Sisyphus. and its theme was really this awakening from being a kind of human doing to human being. So that was part one and of course I got too busy doing to get to part two. But so Sisyphus, this is one of the archetypes that is super popular for a reason.

It's because so many of us in this culture deep down we know that we're hooked on pushing, pushing, pushing. There's some way in which we just get very habituated to doing. And it's a prison because in the doing, there's idea we're trying to get somewhere, but when we're hooked on doing, we never arrive. Ciccifist could never get there, right? There's tons of cartoons. I'll read you a couple of my favorites. This one has some cavemen. And you have to imagine this. They're bowling, okay? And the boulders, they're bowling ball. And it's uphill. Okay, so we know whose turn it is. This is called bowling with Sisyphus. And the cavemen are all there and they're saying, oh great, it's his turn again. I'll bet he takes

forever. It's really good. You can look at it later. So one of the things I often think about in this arctypal trance of pushing is William James and about 120 years ago now, I think it was. He described our predicament. He said that we're in this ceaseless frenzy, always thinking we should be doing something else. How many of you can relate to that? That whatever you're doing, okay, me too. We get hooked in the The true suffering of being hooked in the doing is that we don't touch beingness, which is really what we long for. We really want that piece of, instead of skimming the surface on our way somewhere, which

is where, death, whatever, to arrive in our lives in the being. There was an interview with Arthur Rubenstein and a famous pianist and somebody was praising him and saying, you know, how is it you do the notes as well as you do? And he said this. He did this, he was passionate about it. He said, I handle the notes no better than many others, but the pauses, ah, that's where the art resides. And we intuit that.

But the only way a landscape is beautiful is if there's that space that it's set in, are the pauses that surround the notes. We intuit it. So in our life it's in the pauses and the arriving that we actually touch and experience love. And it's in the pauses when we really stop that we can apprehend a business. bit of the vastness and the mystery that we're a part of. So it's really hard to stop and that's what we're going to explore. Like how do we stop more?

And by the way this isn't like an advertisement for just go sit in a cave and we're going to talk about caves too in a few moments but this is more saying if we don't know how to pause, if we don't know how to arrive in the moment then our way of living becomes automatic and shallow. We're just always in a chain reaction. And I do think of a lot of us have been following this whole saga with the team, the soccer team, the boys and their coach that were caught in the caves, the horrific nature of it. And many of you probably have, in the last 24 or 48 hours, saw the picture of the the boys, several of them in a cave meditating.

And it turns out that their coach took monastic vows for, I think, a year or so. Like many young men, how many ten years? A year or so, ten. Thank you. And so he was really very deeply dedicated to meditation. So there they were, they're in this cave, they're losing air, the water's rising, and he said, This is what we learned to do. We learn to be in caves and how to meditate.

And it's when you meditate, it calms you. It allows you to come to center. Without the stress, you don't need as much air. You actually need less. But basically, it's a refuge. And they taught them to do some meditating. And we got to see pictures of that. When we're afraid, I often use the image of a bicycle. It's like, when we start getting stress, we start pedaling faster. And it's our mind often that's doing the pedaling. And we pedal away from the present moment.

And the more afraid and scared we get, the faster we pedal. And meditation deconditions this primitive response. Meditation says, instead of pedaling faster, when you're stressed, learn to pause. So you can draw on your deepest wisdom. and drawing your deepest compassion. I think it's amazing that that's what happened in that cave. And also that hopefully you'll get into the movie they're making about it, because it's really a good, it's a good example.

So the given is that the largest domains in our life we cannot control, aging, getting sick, dying, having other people age and get sick. sick and die that we love and basically controlling how they treat us, all of those, out of our control. And yet our habit, and this is our primitive reflex, is to keep on trying to control things. So there's this inner controller, this sycifist that's sometimes doing it by pushing and sometimes doing it by grasping and sometimes doing it by freezing or running away, but this inner controller is trying to manipulate things.

and so that we don't stop and draw on our real potential. Let's just take a moment, we'll pause here. And I'd like to invite you to do a reflection. We often do this, just invite you to take a look at today, or if you'd like for the last couple of days, and just notice how much doing there was. and how much pausing? Just start real simple. Did you pause in moments of stress?

How did you respond? And consider this. There's two driving assumptions in the Sisyphus archetype, and they come from our primitive brain. So just consider this. One of them is there's a problem here. I've got a problem In other words, something's wrong

and the second is I need to do something I've got a problem there's something wrong here and I've got to do something and just notice how much of that was there over the last few days the sense you were trying to get through the day manage or prepare for what's ahead

just keep that in mind you can open your eyes if you'd like we're going to come back to this So two assumptions. This is the primitive mind. Something's wrong and I've got to do something. And if you start reading about more contemporary cognitive theorists and so on, one of the examples of the primitive mind, fast thinking,

and the more recently evolved part of our brain, the slower thinking. And usually when we're in stress, we're in that fast-thinking reflex do it, you know, just snap decisions and so on, fight, flight, freeze. When we're fortunate, we have this capacity for slower thinking, which is able to analyze and call on reason and mindfulness and so on. So often, if we look through our day, we're in that fast-thinking mode. And the Internet encourages it. The way we even read the news on the Internet,

it's encouraging a much shallower, faster kind of thinking. One of my favorite stories comes from this high school students did a prank out in the Midwest somewhere. And they had a goat and they actually had three goats. And they painted on one goat number one, on another number two and then on another number four. And they released them into the school. The whole day they cancel classes. Administrators spent the whole day looking for goat number three. And what's that?

That's fast thinking. In order to undo Sisyphus, this habit of just habitually moving through our lives, we have to take a break from problem mentality, from this idea that we've got a problem. Does that resonate for you that we spend a lot of time assuming there's something wrong, we have to get through it? How many of you can relate to that? Let me just see by hands. A good number, okay.

I often will say to myself, in this like, I got this from Joseph Goldstein, one of my earliest teachers. He said, whenever I thought I had a problem, I decided there wasn't one. That's it. Just challenge it. So in Buddhist language, the suffering that we're talking about, the trance of doing really is this ongoing grasping that we're always trying to do something, trying to hold on to something, trying to make something happen.

And the freedom is non-clinging, just letting be. Stop trying to solve the problem, stop doing. And again, I invite you to close your eyes. Just check it out a little bit. And this is a simple reflection of right in this moment. What if this moment there really is no problem? What's here? What if there's really nothing wrong right now?

then what's here? If there's nothing wrong, who am I? Ask that question. What's it like to let go the boulder, just let it fall away? Can you get a glimmer of how much having a problem and thinking something's wrong defines your sense of self and life? If there's no problem right now, nothing to solve, nothing to do, what is here? You can keep your eyes closed if you'd like, but you'd find to open them. There's a friend of mine who's a Tibetan teacher. He teaches with me sometimes here in Washington, Anam Thubten.

And one of his well-known books is called No Self, No Problem. And I also think it's fascinating to sense how no problem, no self. Can you notice a bit how if you really sense, oh, there's no problem. problem, how the boundaries or sense of self get a little more hazy? Perhaps you can sense that. So we're organized around the sense of there's a problem, there's something missing, there's something to do. That's the teaching here.

And if we look, well, what's the genesis of this inner controller that always has a problem to solve? We can sense that all organisms come into existence and they have ongoing needs and whenever the needs are not met, that's a problem. There's a sense of an unmet need. And there's an impetus to do something, to grasp after something, so we can have food or sex or shelter or whatever it is. That's the impetus.

Okay, fine. So we need that. We humans need to have an impetus to take care of ourselves. But it doesn't stop there. The deep question is, how come it's... so chronic that we always think we have to be doing something, that we always think something's wrong. And there we start looking at how when the ego evolves and become self-aware, what do we become aware of? We start noticing mortality and it's the background of everything. So it's not like,

oh, I've satisfied this need right now, I can be. We never get to be because we're always afraid that around the corner something bad's going to happen. And we're always tensing against what's around the corner. I'm checking in again. Does that resonate for you? You can raise your hand just so can see. Okay, thank you.

Live streamers, that looks like around 80, 90%. So we're just looking at our predicament. how come we always go around thinking something's wrong and feeling like we have to do stuff, pushing the boulder? We're just trying to set the frame for this. And the big deal is that we have in the background a sense of impending loss. And then we make all sorts of stories about it, like in one parent describes when a family dog died,

the mom tried to break the news really gently to her little five-year-old. And she said, we can all be happy now little bows up in heaven with God. God. And the little girl said, but mom, what's God going to do with a dead dog? You know, it's like, I've always loved this guy who's at the therapist and he's on a couch, you know, and the therapist happens to be the grim reaper, you know. And the caption is the grim reaper's talking to the therapist and he says, no, I'm sorry, doctor, it's your time that's up. Okay, so again, the two assumptions, once I got a problem and now I know the ego thinks the problems, I'm going to lose stuff around the corner, something bad's going to happen, something's wrong, and often there's a sense

of, you know, something's wrong with me, and then there's the, I have to do something. Not only that, the ego thinks it should be able to take care of stuff. So when we can't, when our body does gets sick or we start really looking old or we get the divorce or the custody doesn't work. Deep down we think we should have been able to work it out. That anything that doesn't feel good in our lives, if it feels bad, it means I'm bad. Just if that doesn't resonate, just check it out. But basically, there's very little pausing because we're always trying to take care of stuff. And the more trauma there's been in us, the more the engine is on, that background hum,

saying, fear, fear, something bad's going to happen, do something. You're wrong. Life's wrong. It's the mom that writes the son, the telegram. This is from way, way back, and it says, start worrying. Details to follow. You know that one? It's that kind of thing. So this is the Tao Te Ching. Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? I just want to let that be there for a bit.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving? till right action, our wise action arises by itself. So you can feel this invitation to pause, that there's a wise response to our situations and it doesn't come from an ego who's pushing a boulder or wildly rehearsing or defending or obsessing.

It comes from pause, like the boys in the cave. Come into stillness, drawn the inner resources. So I'd like to explore for the rest of our time three pathways to pausing, to letting the boulder drop away, when we're kind of hooked in stress and pushing. And you might have in your mind some place in your life where you know you want to unhook some, where you want to be able to pause and listen more to somebody who matters to you or whether you want to be able to pause and listen to your own body,

you know, let that kind of body wisdom guide you. So we're going to explore three pathways. And I thought I'd begin by just letting you sharing kind of my own story of how I kind of got in touch with my inner sycifis, just as an example, because to use these pathways, you have to catch when you're in the trance of doing. You just have to become aware.

You have to just know, okay, the engine's cooking, I'm pushing. Stop. Things started waking up for me when I was at college, I think it was a sophomore, and I was in psychoanalysis. I had some depression and I remember sharing a dream that I was always felt like I was struggling to get somewhere and not arriving and being exhausted and talking about the image of Sisyphus. And that's when I had my first insight which is I'm always trying hard.

There's just some, and that felt like an insight at the time that on some level I feel like I'm always trying hard to, you know, overcome obstacles, problems and what doesn't matter whether I'm with my friends having social situation or at work or very politically active or whatever it is. I'm always trying to fix myself, prove myself, so on. The next insight that came fast on the heels of that was that I feel like I need to strive to win love and approval. In other words, I am just not okay as I am. So that was kept me pushing the boulder. Like I have to strive in order to get others love and approval. now that I'm saying this like 50-some years or 45 years later or whatever, it sounds like,

yeah, right, so who doesn't know that? But that was the second in the sequence, that I was trying to always strive to get people to love me. Then the third thing was that the more I try hard, the worse I feel and the more insecure I feel, that the pushing wasn't working. And then the next insight was, I just really hate that in me, which is always pushing. So I was discovering Sisyphus and hating my inner Sisyphus. And it all cracked open when we were having some sort of a sensitivity session or something, the women in the ashram community were sharing about ourselves.

And I remember just closing how much I was always competing and trying to get approval and prove myself and how ugly that felt to me. And I have no idea what response they gave because I was so, it was so vulnerable and I felt so ashamed of myself, that's all I remember. And then on my own, I remember it kept cracking open that I just kept having to stay with that that enormity of self-aversion. And typically what I would have done, when I would have done, when I was when my feelings were like that as, oh, I'll do another set of yoga and I'll chant a mantra and I'll, you know, I would have done more but something in me said, just stay and feel it. And so I kept staying with the shame and I got underneath it and what I was fearing was

rejection with felt like a kind of death and by staying with it and seeing how all that pushing was coming because I was fearing rejection. I felt this incredible wave of tenderness for myself. It was like, wow, all these years you've been trying so hard and the trying doesn't work to make you feel better and there's been all this fear of not being loved and this way and I had to be that in touch with it to have this wave of compassion that completely forgave the inner Sisyphus and that, um, that, That was the shift.

I started feeling very kind towards myself and something settled. And then I could just see the Sisypice character playing out and the other parts of my personality, but that wasn't defining who I was. And I really got to pause and rest at home in an awareness that was bigger than any of those identities, I had to unhook from being identified with the doer. And this has stayed with me through the years, recognizing the doer and unhooking because identification with the doer, with this fearful, always-driving, always-trying doer, was a very small, limiting sense of self. So now it's much, much quicker.

I, in fact, you know, I just catch, oh, caught in, you know, pushing, striving, doing, I can immediately feel the tightness of and I say, come on, honey, you know, relax. And then there's that being quality again. So the shift from doing to being is I've been, I've greased it, you know, I've done it so many times. But the core suffering is so real and I encounter it so often of having an identity wrapped around the doing self, that it takes that kind of attention. If I look back and I had to articulate the steps of unhooking, what I see is the steps of rain, of recognizing, allowing, investigating, and nurturing after the rain is being.

I want to walk you through that. I want to walk you through the same steps I went through, but more generically, with any of these guided practices of moving like from doing to being or any of them, you're going to need your own pace and how I lead it's going to be too fast because we're in a class situation. So I invite you to practice on your own and slow it down but I'd like to give you a taste right now. So for all of you, those that are with us live streaming, those that are here now, those that are listening from wherever at any time, take a moment to pause so you can pause more deeply. And we're going to explore a little of what it means to let go of the boulder. And even for this initial pause, maybe let go

a little of the boulder of tensing muscles. What happens if you soften in the shoulders a little and soften your hands and take a few full breaths because when we're stressed and when we're in a dure mode we're not breathing deeply. So let's unhook. We're going to practice unhooking together with rain. And you might scan and sense a stressful situation in your life, perhaps to do with another person or you get reactive. And remember the reactivity can be in your mind, in your mind. It doesn't have to be in your actions. Somewhere that you keep pushing the boulder by defending yourself or feeling aggressive or judgmental, feeling afraid, backing off. Some stressful situation where you're reacting with that primitive reflex where you're in

Sisyphus mode controlling. And the recognizing and allowing, just to see kind of like that self-character doing its thing, kind of witnessing, okay, there's where I go into controlling, either with my mind or in my communication, where I'm competing or approving or defending, attacking. So we begin by recognizing it and just letting it be there. Allowing means that we, again, are pausing, we're not trying to fix anything. Give it some space. You might investigate a little bit, very gentle by noticing if there's a disliking of the controller, a disliking of the Sisyphus self or whatever you want to consider it, that certainly was the case for me. And see if you can bring

some real interest and care as you investigate and sense, well, what's driving this? For me, I was driven to, I was striving to get love, to get respect, to not be rejected. What's driving the controller in you? What's the need in there? What do you need? The more controlling, the more it's a sign of an unmet need. Is it for more love, for more attention, more safety? as you listen in for the need that's driving you, the possibility of offering some kindness,

offering some care. And you might even practice right now as you're putting your hand on your heart just to begin to let that gesture invite in the care as if your most awake heart, your future yourself, your most evolved being, can offer kindness to the controller. There may be words to offer to yourself right now that come naturally, a kind of message that of understanding and care, there may be an image, sometimes it's just a symbol, it's okay, you can relax. But it's filled with kindness, sensing the possibility of that part of you letting go

of the boulder, just relaxing for a bit. This is nurturing and as you feel ready, just to rest a bit in that beingness, well there's nothing to do. Again, sensing if nothing's wrong, who am I? If there's not a problem, what's here? And let go into that hearness, that beingness, just be. And know that whenever that striving or pushing or defending or obsessing comes up, that you can begin to unhook yourself more and more and make this movement from doing to being by recognizing what's going on and allowing it, investigating a bit, sensing where the need is, offering the nurturing kindness. and then rest again. If there's no problem, what is here?

So one of the pathways is this mindfulness and nurturing of rain. The second pathway I want to mention, and you can listen with your eyes closed or open your eyes, however you like. The second pathway is what we might call inquiry, where we challenge this limbic belief that something's wrong directly. Rather than going through the steps of mindfulness of compassion, which are really needed if there's a big tangle, sometimes we can just go, okay, is this really true?

The doer is driven by some basic beliefs. If I don't keep striving, people won't love me. Right now, if I don't act a certain way, I will not have your love. That's the kind of the belief. Well, inquiry goes, wait a minute, is that true? Okay? You know, we often talk about how the slave and the beliefs we hold on to are real but not true. This is from one of my Tibetan teachers.

They're real but not true. So my belief that I have to strive, be loved, might be a real belief going on and a real feeling, but it's not truth. Real but not true. So I teach a lot about this, how we are organized around these beliefs. There's a problem, I'm the problem. And that part of the unhooking is just directly challenge, challenge that belief. What if it's not true?

So there are many ways and that could be a whole series of talks on how to challenge beliefs. But I'd like to share in one story of a woman who went to one of the retreats we taught a couple of years ago. And she came, she's a lot of depression, a lot of the trance of unworthiness, that something's wrong with me. I'm, you know, everybody else is like a Buddha sitting, you know, beautifully in the room, and I'm the one schlep that's got all these, like, stuff going on in my mind and I'll never get anywhere.

You know, so, and she basically said, if I feel bad, I must be bad. and she felt bad. So here's what she writes. After many months of this, I went on a silent meditation retreat. That's what we're talking about. Halfway through, just as everyone else was getting in their deep silence, I began to panic because I knew there were only three more days

before I returned home and I wasn't fixed. On that day, the teacher asked, Who are you if you are not broken? What is there if there's nothing to fix? You're sensing the same kind of questions. It was a shocking question. Since I spent so much in my life under the assumption that if I wasn't so up, it was all my fault. Though I didn't know it at the time, that was the moment I really stopped trying to figure it all out.

That was the beginning of the end of depression. It was a leap towards radical self-kindness. What if I'm not broken? What if there's nothing to fix? How can I just sit with the sadness, grief, and despair with love? And I realized that even though there was nothing I had a fix in myself to be happy, I did have to change my life. Ironically, it was by sitting with and inviting in whatever feeling

sadness, anger, resentment, grief was here, allowing it to be here. In other words, nothing to fix. Instead of the doing, coming into being with the experiences that are right here. She said, I still cry, but now I'm in the good company of my best self, not a nasty taskmaster.

And after that cry, there's so much more energy for living, for joy. the pausing and being with, letting go of the boulder, gives rise to joy. So this is the second pathway of letting go of the controls. Really challenging the belief right there. Okay, I'm believing something's wrong that I have to keep doing. What if that's not true? The third pathway that I want to just touch on because these are each talks unto themselves

is the pathway of, for some, not being able to wake up from the controller unless there's really hitting a bottom and having to fully surrender. So this is the full surrender pathway. It's when we get it when our lives, like evidence is absolutely everywhere we look. that we cannot control it. And then something in us just stops pushing the boulder. It doesn't work. And for one man who was addicted to cocaine

and to manipulating others, his job was threatened. His boss said, you have to stop, you have to go to 12-step program, etc. His wife was going to divorce him. He had bought him. And his waking out from the doer, to being, being who he was.

One of his tools was just to keep saying over and over again, not my will, my heart's will. We have to surrender. For another woman friend whose daughter was struggling with heroin for years, in and out of treatment centers, this became the center of her life. living with the fear that her daughter was going to die on the streets basically. And she was an enabler and every round her daughter would hit kind of a bottom and she'd help out and the daughter would clean up and then relapse again.

And she kept providing the money or the housing or the next treatment. So very amashed, she'd get really angry that her daughter would go back and just re-enter all her old habits, but she kept giving in. Okay, so she's aware she's an enabler and really struggling because she is absolutely terrified and traumatized at the notion of, of course, her daughter being hurt or killed. But she finally recognized that trying to control it, pushing the boulder was perpetuating it and making it worse. So she got that and that was her bottom herself when she had to surrender and basically go, it's out of my hands. As soon as we have the wisdom that it's out of my hands, our hands open, we start letting go of the boulder. And for her,

it was just handing it over. Surrender has a lot of different. ways of unfolding. But one of the most profound is the sense that this boulder that we're pushing or in some way clinging to just handing it, and it's with this almost this gesture, handing it into a bigger universe. And for her it was handing it into the divine mother's hands, which is really just the love of the universe. She couldn't do it as a mother.

let it be held by something larger. And it was like unplugging a bottle because she had been holding so much. What surged up for her was the grief that she was hiding from. And she had weeks of weeping. And all she could do was stay with the grief. Okay, so she went from doing, controlling, tight, afraid, to absolutely surrendering and grieving. and in that grieving she found this very vast tenderness.

There's a lot of self-compassion, a lot of compassion for her daughter, but a capacity not to, she could keep her boundaries. And her daughter has recovered and it didn't happen until she surrendered and created her boundaries. She still was a wonderful giving mother, but in a way that wasn't enabling. So she got out of the control, blame, anger into a being place that knew wisely how to create boundaries. So I share this story because there are different pathways. And you might at some moments feel like you're in a tangle of doing

and you're walking through the steps of rain and then again and again doing it will give you this amazing unhooking to a very resourced place in you. At other times you're going to just see this pattern of thinking and cut through and say, might this be real but not true? Is it really true that something's wrong with me?

What would it be right now if there was no problem to solve? Sometimes it's going to cut through the story. Other times it's going to be such, you're hitting such a wall that something in you is going to go, I surrender and open to the grief that you've been running from, the sorrow, but let it be. And in that you'll find a larger space of being that really feels like home. So I want to end by saying that one of the Tibetan teachers,

I often read, says as long as we're trying to figure out how we can escape from our present situation, we can't notice much about it. Only when we feel that this is it, this is how it is right now, without any clutching towards something different, can we realize truth, the changing flow and the light of being that emanates. So with that, I'd like to invite you to close your eyes again. I'll just practice in these last few moments this shift from doing to being and this final reflection quite simply is practicing letting go of pushing the boulder. So you might scan again and sense if there's any pushing or holding going on in your body with your

muscles to sense what happens if you really let go, allowing your shoulders to relax, your hands to soften, your belly to be saw. You might sense what it means to stop pushing and just relax in the heart area, letting yourself feel what's there. And for these next moments the only practice is letting life be as it is. If you notice any controlling, if the mind starts taking over with thoughts, just relax again. You might use the word drop, just drop, let it go. Any clinging to thoughts, any doing, when there's a noticing, just relax. Drop.

You might gently whisper, stop. Really stop. If there's nothing to do, what is here? listening to this little verse, like the little stream making its way through the mossy crevices, I too quietly turn clear and transparent. Like the little stream making its way through the mossy crevices. I too quietly turn clear and transparent.

stay 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.