Tara Brach - Part 2-Realizing Our Natural Joy

Episode Date: April 14, 2010

2008-04-30 In the buddhist teachings, joy is a natural expression of our awakened heart. In these two talks we will explore how we block off joy, and ways that we can cultivate and embody this intrinsic facet of our being.

In the Buddhist tradition, there's something called the Brahma Vaharas. And the word Brahma Vahara means divine abode. And they speak to the qualities of the awakened heart-mind. When we really come home to who we are, the qualities that naturally shine forth. And the divine abodes include loving kindness, that quality of care when we see what's beautiful, what we appreciate. The Brahmavahars include compassion, which is that tenderness when we recognize suffering. The third Brahma Vahara is joy, and joy is both opening to the suffering and the beauty,

the joys and the sorrows. And joy is what we're going to be talking about tonight, and it's a continuation from last week. But knowing this crowd, I know some of you were here, some of you weren't, so it doesn't depend on being here last week. So there is a phrase that we use a lot, it's a Taoist phrase, which is the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. And that being a full human being is having a heart that has the courage and presence to really open to the whole realm.

Zorba the Greek called it the whole catastrophe, remember? So this open, alive presence, this inclusiveness is joy. Joy is an expansive feeling, and it's not kind of an artificial ballooning out, it's that openness that comes when we're just not pushing away any part of life. So in Pali, the word is Mudita, which is joy in awakening the life within, and it's also joy in the awakening of others. When we're feeling joy, there's this sense of really celebrating life and celebrating the beauty in all being, seeing it and loving it. So this is Andrew Gide. He says, know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness.

Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation. Now let me, I just want to speak to the word obligation, because it's not a should, the traditional sense of thou shalt feel joyful. That's a setup for trouble. It's like when somebody says to you, just relax, you know, and it's like, you know. So it's more obligation. It's a deep commitment because we intuit that joy is a natural expression of who we are. it's a commitment because it's a natural expression of who we are Ramana Maharshi puts it

this way says the whole of the spiritual path is to be who you are which means to really recognize this fullness of being this capacity for love for compassion for joy

and really be that live it so Gide says it's rare and I think that's really right on the money that when I talk to people about joy and I, you know, say, so what's it like for you? I mean, how much joy do you experience? How often? Some say glimmers now and then. It would be interesting someday to do hand raises and I could say on a scale of one to ten and all that. But instead, let me ask you to reflect for a moment, if you will,

just to close your eyes and just since these recent days and sense, and sense have there been moments of joy, moments of true ease and well-being, of that sense of just as it is now is perfect, just the way things are, it's that kind of, it's as good as it gets, not wanting anything different to reflect, and it's not like taking stocking, making a report card on yourself as much as just a kind of a sensing of how much do you really tap into this capacity. And you can open your eyes if you'd like. If we ask ourselves that question of how come so little, it's really the most basic teachings in all the perennial traditions, which is that we have this habit of wanting life different. It's very deep in us that we're always,

wanting life different. That in most moments in some way, if there's any unpleasantness, we're fighting it. And if there's some pleasantness, we're usually scheming on how to sustain it or continue it. I think it's interesting that we see joy in children and to say, well, how come children and not adults so much? And in a way, it's because children are less habituated.

Their personalities are less fixated. on trying to grab onto more, or trying to resist unpleasantness. There's more space. It doesn't mean they're not in reactivity, but there are spaces that aren't yet habituated where that kind of light can shine through, where there can be a spontaneity to play and to enjoy

and to be full of wonder. You know, Pablo Picasso said that the first half of life he tried to paint in a mature way and in the second half of life he tried to learn to paint as a child but that was great so in the Buddhist tradition the traditional language for how we

are blocked from joy has two parts and the first part's called the near enemy which is that we get blocked because we get attached to substitutes that if we look at our lives, we spend a huge swaths of time in some way trying to be happy by fixating on what we call false refuges or things that we think will do it but actually don't.

We have a mistaken idea about what's going to make us happy. I mean, we think that we're going to be happy if we get something accomplished at work or we have the right partner, we lose the weight or we get healthy and over certain sickness. And there's been all this really interesting research done on joy and happiness. And what it basically says is we have each of us a kind of fixed set point for happiness. Are some of you familiar with this research? It's interesting. And that we anticipate good things will make us happier and we overestimate how happy they'll make us.

And we have a temporary surge, but then we always level out back at our basic normal happiness. quotient. And then we also over-anticipate how much something bad is going to make us unhappy. And we definitely will drop down. But we end up leveling out again at this kind of, it's a biochemical thing. We just have this habit of where we land. What can change the set point, because it is changeable. There is neuroplasticity here, is not getting what we think we want. It's not, I think Thoreau said that we put the ladder on the wall and we climb up the ladder only to find it was against the wrong wall, you know. And it's not finding the right wall either.

It's realizing that we don't need a ladder to climb a wall, that we don't need to go anywhere. We change our set point when we cultivate the presence that arrives fully here. When we know how to be here, without any argument, complaint, resistance, or grasping, we discover the joy that's beyond any of the substitutes' capacity to really, really wake up our hearts. So you can see it. I remember about a year and a half ago, a friend had a new romantic infatuation, and I saw how she was really excited and there was kind of the look of joy but she was constantly, constantly,

each step of the way, analyzing the relationship to see if this was going to be the one and it was like fraught with this grasping and this anxiety. And you can see it when we get a promotion at work or when anything good happens because it's a false refuge, it's fraught with this anxiety about how to keep it, how to make it more, how it might go away.

I heard a story. This was a newspaper article done on Appalachia. And they interviewed a woman in her house. And she had a house with, I think, two and a half rooms, a dirt floor with plastic over the windows, no appliances, no bathroom. And the question was, what would you do if you won the lottery? And she thought, and she said, you know, I think I'd give it to the poor. So this is the This is really the deep understanding of enough But there's not a sense that in this moment There's something more that we need That really allows the heart to feel joy

So the near enemy is the sense That we have to climb a ladder We're on our way to getting more That it's not here That there's something better And it can be really subtle You know one of the one of the great Japanese poets writes,

when in Kyoto, and I hear the kuku sing, I long for Kyoto. So it's a very subtle sense that what we long for somewhere else. In fact, any sense that there's something out there means that we're not living the presence that is the very source of joy.

So that's the near enemy. Now, the far enemy of joy is when we actually push away enjoyment. There's kind of an aversion to happiness and I mentioned this last week that in some way there's this undercurrent that it's dangerous to relax, it's dangerous to enjoy,

and so many of us have this that we begin to kind of take it easy or take pleasure and there's something in us that says it's not safe. And I've described the conditioning before that we've inherited it through the eons that

our earliest ancestors, if they lay back and rested and basked on the rock and in the sun and enjoyed the sense, would have, you know, not heard the slither of a snake nearby and gotten crunched, you know? So it's like we've got this wiring to say, it's not safe

to relax and enjoy what's here. Be vigilant. There's one teacher, Bokini Kusumo who says that it's true that we have just constant changing pleasant moments, unpleasant, neutral moments. There's not as many unpleasant moments as it seems, and yet our mind fixates on them and remembers them. And you can think back of the week and think it wasn't a great week and not have noticed the moments where there was some space and some sense of at home, some presence.

So the experience of something's wrong becomes the primary filter and I speak of this a lot and I invite you to check it out that we fixate we fixate on the sense that something's wrong and that skews everything we see some months ago

my mother lives right near a reservation she was very concerned because the county legislation ruled that they could do have a game hunt at the deer herds and that's where she walks and it was appalling to her

in her woods there that they were going to have this game hunt and so on that Sunday afternoon she went to Freshfields to get some food and she saw all these tables by the side of the

market and they had a big sign saying four game and so she got very very upset and she went over to a woman sitting behind the table and it was very loud and noisy and she tried to express her concern about this game

hunt and the woman was completely confused and and she tried to explain but my mother didn't understand what she was saying it was really loud and halfway home halfway home from the store she realized that the tables were selling snacks for the super ball game and she had been you know she had been so fixated on this game hunt now there are many times we're fixated on things that are actually important things to be thinking about but it's skews like it's like we then see the world through those filters. So it was a Super Bowl day. She's not into

it, so she didn't realize that. You might remember this story of a novice in a monastery. She's introduced to her new cell and told that this is a silent practice. There's no speaking at the monastery. And that every five years she'd have

an interview with Mother Superior, but could only say three words. So five years passed, and at the interview Mother Superior asked, so, how are you doing my child? And the novice answers, bed too hard. She told her to keep practicing and praying five more years past. And when they meet Mother Superior asks again how she's doing, and the novice answers, food is bad. So the Mother Superior responds, well, keep practicing and praying my daughter. At her next interview, 15 years after arrival,

Mother Superior asked how she's doing and the novice responds I quit now and the Mother Superior looked at her and said you know I'm not surprised you've been doing nothing but complaining ever since you got here so the truth is

we get addicted to this sense that something's wrong and I think it's a really an interesting question because we get addicted to depression we get addicted to a view of the world the future where things don't get better and to mistrusting.

And so in a deep way, there's who would we be if we really relaxed? Who would we be if we didn't believe all our thoughts about what's wrong? If we begin to pay attention

will notice how much our whole sense of who we are is organized around the worrying and the planning and the sense that something's wrong, the judging,

the judging ourselves, the judging others. It becomes our identity. It gives us grand. It's like if it's very disorienting to put aside all our notions of something's wrong. It's like all the meaning in life, you know? It's like all our planning, all our busyness, all our sense of self-importance getting through the day. It's up for grabs.

So we are addicted to the comparing and the judging and we do it with other people too. And it's very interesting to notice that when we have a sense of, well, something's wrong with me or my life isn't right, It's very difficult to be happy for others when things go well for them. We act like we're happy, but inside it, it bothers us when our life doesn't feel good. The French philosopher Montaigne says there's something altogether not too displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends. Really why I'm bringing this up is that we get locked into a state of body mind that doesn't allow us to enjoy the moment. We get fixated on the something's wrong with me, something's wrong with you, and we can't enjoy our own life and we can't be happy for others. So that's one way we push

it away and we also push it away by chasing after pleasures and the question is how do we open to the stream of joy? How do we begin to relax and really open to what's here? So that's the rest of our exploration will be some meditations and kind of inquiry. What really opens us to joy? And to say that it always begins with being able to pause. And I hope I remember to say this every week because it becomes more and more clear that our habitual trance,

the trance of daily life is a trance of reactivity. We're in trans because in some way we're pulling away from what doesn't feel good we're chasing after something and the only way to wake up out of that constant reactivity is to pause and you can just pause

even right in this moment and sense that in an intentional pause in stopping natural presence a natural presence starts coming through. We pause, and we pause in the busyness of our minds.

We step out of the storyline, out of trying to figure out things so much. So the first step is to pause, and the second step is to willingly embrace whatever is going on

in the moment, and we start just where we are. So there's a quality of saying yes. So again, I just want to invite you to just check that out, just to pause. And just feel that in the pause, there's no need to figure anything out. Just let your senses be awake. Pause, discontinue the figuring out, and just say yes.

And saying yes could be a cellular kind of surrendering or allowing what is right here. The beginning of coming home to a joyful, open heart is to pause to just notice what's going on and to say yes. You can continue to kind of sense that. And I was this weekend in New England teaching at a meditation center there. And one of the women in our groups at the very beginning of the weekend shared that she had just lost a, a really significant relationship. She and her partner agreed that it was the end. They'd been together for a long time, two women.

They'd been together for like 15, 16 years. And it wasn't with any animosity, which is really going in different directions. And yet the enormity of her grief and her fear, she basically said that I don't trust that I can recover from this, and I'm afraid to open to how big it is. and so we basically explored just pausing again and again and just very gently just saying yes just saying yes so she she was practicing through the day and at the end of the day she described

this the next day what happened was that she just started sending a message okay i'm just i'm listening to this fear and to this grief i'm listening i'm here so she was just sending a message of yes presence yes presence and she was just sending a message of yes presence and she was just sending And she went for a walk in the late afternoon, and it's getting to be spring even up in New England. It's slow, but it's happening. And she said that as she came home to the hurting place, she came home to being in the spring.

She actually had to come home to the vulnerability to feel at home in the world some. And even though there's like these currents of the sadness and currents of the fear, She said that the realness of being at home with herself, finally she'd been so afraid, she'd been fighting, being with what's there, that in that there was a sweetness, and she could really let in the sweetness of the world around her.

That space opens up when we're with what's real, even the most painful experiences, even the deepest losses. Another student at the end of a retreat that had gone up and down and up and down, and we're touching anguish and touching, you know, great, great delights and so on, he said at the end of the retreat, I finally get it. The joy is in getting real. It doesn't matter what particular weather system you're being with. So that's the first piece of this opening to joy is this pausing and saying yes to the what's right here. But there's another piece, and this is a little paradoxical, and we don't talk about it that much. it's also opening to what's possible

opening to this this fertile formless existence that just absolutely keeps manifesting in all these amazing ways that part of being real is sensing this enormous creativity of this life that's right here C.S. Lewis puts it this way is as all joy reminds of the sense of imminence of infinite

possibility of creativity. It's never a possession. Joy intuits what is about to be. This is Martha Graham. She says, there's a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is,

nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly to keep the channel open. To open to the vastness and mystery and creativity of who we are. To be open to that.

So what this really speaks to is that we get hitched in all these limiting stories about ourselves of what we can do or can't do. If we notice how many moments what we're doing is packaged to get someone else's approval, how many moments of how we present ourselves versus a spontaneity of being, it's because we're identified with those stories about who we're supposed to be and we're not living from our beingness. Be who you are. That means be, live from the truth of who you are,

from the vastness and the mystery. So we pause. We let go of that incessant dialogue that keeps reminding us of a small self. We say yes to what's here. We say yes to the possibility that's unfolding. and we awaken to be who we are, that vastness. This is D.H. Lawrence.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright, but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taught with power. We shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down.

We shall laugh and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. So joy is not just when we contact this immediate experience, it's to sense that possibility inherent in our vastness, in the mystery of what we are. Now the next piece of what allows us to be a, available to joy is to pause and savor the moments when we recognize them. Slow down and pay attention. There are moments. There are moments that we know we're appreciating just the life that's here. You've had them. You've had them when you've watched the blossoms

of their different phases and when the bird songs have come out. And you have them when you see someone you love and you see the light in their eyes and you have them when you just slow down and get quiet enough that that quietness feels like home just for a moment we'll pause and get familiar with that we're very familiar with the something's wrong things aren't okay sense that's familiar our nervous system knows that so get familiar with the quiet sense and the quiet spaces of appreciation when the beauty is right here. Moonendraji, one of the great Indian teachers, I've shared this before as I love it.

When he was asked why he meditates, he had such a simple response. He said, when I walk to the town square each morning, I'll notice the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. So this obligation that Ghee talks about is this commitment to really living the life fully, to saying yes, to slowing down, to savoring the moments that we might tumble through

and not really notice. There's an attitude that's really helpful, and I think it was captured by a Buddhist nun. Her name was Ono from the 1500s. And she had a mantra, and the mantra was, thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever. I try that out for a week.

Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever. It's a great one. So I learned about it a long, long time ago. And my son, who, oh gosh, when I learned about it, he must have been six years old, I tried to teach it to him. Because, you know, he was in that complete complaining mode

all the time. So his name's Nar. I said, okay, gnar, listen to this. And so I taught it to him. And a few days after I taught it to him, I was taking him to a dentist. And I was on the beltway, and the beltway was stopped in traffic. And I was fuming. I mean, I was like fuming. And he nudged me. He said, Mom, thank you for everything. Anyway, it's the last Buddha teachings I gave him for a while. So to be able to pause, to be able to appreciate what's here, the other piece to that's to intentionally create spaces in our life of pausing. There's a beautiful reading I'd like to share about the Sabbath, Shabbat.

To disconnect from our normal attitude of making, doing, and changing. To experience the world free from the need to interfere with it is a transplant. transformative and liberating experience, but it can't be achieved in the midst of a day filled with getting, spending, speeding, and making. So we take one solid period of time, 24 hours, to change our relationship to the world, to refrain from acting upon it, and instead to stand back and celebrate the grandeur and mystery of creation. The Shabbat has a joyful feeling. It doesn't have to be one day a week. It doesn't have to be just on a Saturday or a Sunday.

The beauty of the Dharma, of the path, and I mean the universal Dharma, is that we can pause and still be active. We can do our work and do our play and wash the dishes and speak with each other and live our lives and inwardly sense that presence that really is a source of joy. So we train by formally pausing. Does that make sense? We come and we sit and that's a formal pause where we really learn to not be fighting what's unpleasant, not be chasing after what's pleasant. You know, we come together these weeks and we're training ourselves to stop, to notice what's happening and get intimate with our life, to say yes. That is the, we're kind of discovering

how to inhabit presence. But this isn't for the cushion. This isn't a practice. It's a church on Sunday or just on the cushion on Wednesday nights or the chair on Wednesday nights. It's how to live in that way in our moments. Or in some way we're saying, thank you for this too. This too and then this too.

It's the last kind of training or reminder about really waking up our natural joy is that in addition to saying yes and in addition to pausing and savoring and creating more pauses, joy is cultivated as it's expressed to actually express it that we celebrate the beauty and the mystery.

And if I take that from three different traditions because I think all wise cultures celebrate the beauty. The Sufis, Rumi says, let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. And then one rabbi wrote, If you never want to see the face of hell, when you come home from work every night,

dance with your kitchen towel. And if you're worried about waking up your family, take off your shoes. And then from, this is a Christian story that some of you might remember. A new monk arrives at the monastery. He's assigned to help. with the other monks in copying from the old canons and the laws of the church by hand.

He notices, however, that all the monks are copying from copies, not the original manuscript. So the new monk goes to the abbot to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up. In fact, that error would land up in all subsequent copies. The abbot says, well, we've been copying from copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son. So he goes down to the dark caves underneath the monosophon where the original manuscript has been held in a lock vault that hasn't been open for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the old abbot. Eventually, the young monk gets worried and goes downstairs to look for him,

and he sees him banging his head against the wall and crying uncontrollably. The young monk asked the old abbot, Father, father, what's wrong? And in a choking voice, the old abbot replies, the word is celebrate. So all the traditions in their own way. So maybe what we'll do is a little bit of practice where we take some of these pieces

and bring them together. You don't have to move a lot, but just sit in a way that's comfortable. This will be very short, but I think you'll find that it helps to tie together some of what the words have pointed at. We have this intention towards joy not as a chasing after another state,

but just as a commitment to realize and live from our wholeness. That's easy to use it against ourselves and say, oh, I'm too grim a person or I'm this or I'm that. And that's not the idea at all. It's more to sense the possibility. And in a way that's kind of courageous to explore getting more intimate, with our life, with the joys and the sorrows.

So we begin by pausing, right, this moment, and let it be a radical pausing, like really stopping it to be right here, sensing behind any veil of thinking, just the vividness of being here. And notice what happens if your whole being says yes to what's right here. Just letting go into the,

pureness. You might notice that part of what's here is physical, pleasant or unpleasant. Sensations. Yes. This too. This too is as good a language. Or it's okay. Just in a green. You might notice your heart feels numb or squeezed or open, sad, happy. Yes. A cellular yes. Notice how the yes can go even deeper to a pure surrendering presence. It's described this way that in this choiceless, never-ending flow of life, there's an infinite array of choices. One alone brings happiness to love what is, fully hear,

awake, saying yes, being the presence that's allowing, knowing that's tender, bowing to that. Our celebration is like we're blessing the life that's here. And we widen the circles by bringing to mind someone that we care about. This is called sympathetic joy. And since someone you care about that's having a bit of good fortune, that something good is happening in their lives, take your time because this is a powerful practice to bring to mind someone who's having a bit of good fortune where in some way they're happy about something. And sense their happiness and if it's not a deep happiness, sense their potential to be

deeply happy. Imagine and sense that possibility, what they look like, how they'd be, if they really could relax and open to the joy that's in them. Visualize it, wish for it, celebrate You might even send the message, may you be joyful, may you be fully alive with the blessings in your life and widening the circles just to include all beings, all of us here, all beings, just sensing your natural wish that all beings experience the natural joy of being alive. The poet Nanayo Sakaki writes, within a circle of one meter you sit

pray and sing within a shelter 10 meters large you sleep well rain sounds a lullaby within a field a hundred meters large raised rice and goats within a valley a thousand meters large gather firewood water wild

vegetables within a forest 10 kilometers large play with raccoons hawks poison snakes and butterflies. Within a circle 10,000 kilometers large, go see the southern coral reef in summer.

Within a circle 10,000 kilometers large, walking somewhere on the earth. Within a circle 100,000 kilometers large, swimming in the sea of shooting stars. Within a circle

1 million kilometers large, upon the spaced out yellow mustard blossoms, the moon in the east, the sun west. Within a circle 10 billion kilometers large, pop far out of the solar system mandala. Within a circle 10,000 light years large, the galaxy full blooming in spring. Within a circle, one billion light years large, Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry blossoms. Now, Within a circle, 10 billion light years large, all thoughts of time, space, are burnt away.

There again, you sit, pray, and sing. You sit, pray, and sing. We close with our prayer that all beings may discover that natural joy of being alive and feeling our connectedness with the life that's within us, each other with all beings. We'll close as we open tonight with the simple mantra, Ohm. So again, if you will, just to center at the heart and then pause for a moment. Pause again to come home to the realness and the tenderness of presence so that as you chant you can surrender into the sound current, you can listen to the sound current, be one with

please inhale deeply. Teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.