Tara Brach - Part 2 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-14)

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Part 2 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-14) - These two talks address the inquiry: How do we awaken from the contempt and hatred that causes so much suffering in our world? The first talk looks at how we can use the practices of mindfulness and compassion to decondition our habits of self-blame and self-hatred, as well as the importance of helping each other defuse the trance of unworthiness. The second talk extends the use of these practices to situations where we've locked into external "bad othering." These times need our deepened dedication to love: By intentionally arousing compassion for ourselves and others, we directly contribute to the evolution of consciousness in our world. 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. Many of you know of the poet Hafeis, one of my favorites. He's a Sufi mystic and one story is that a man came to him and talked to him talked to him out about a profoundly enlightening experience where he had seen a vision of God and he had merged with light and love and he basically was asking, was it real? This is the response.

Do you have any goats and nodded? Do you have a wife, not at children, nodded again, parents, friends? The realness of that experience shows itself through the kindness you express with each be in your life. This is the manifestation of a spiritual path in the human realm, its kindness. And I'm aware as I think about it that really that the spiritual path cannot be separated from our relationships with the world. And if we think of the most famous spiritual leaders from the last century, if we think of Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or Desmondi, or Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, each one of them were social activists, really

dedicated to social activism responding to suffering and they were particularly social activists responding to the suffering of the most oppressed and vulnerable people in the world. So notably their activism was out of compassion and not hatred. Their activism was a spiritual activism. Compassions beyond anything partisan. It's the human's capacity for waking up. That was their action. I remember the first time I heard about the Dalai Lama

referring to the Chinese as, My Friend the Enemy. That was a great way to do it. You know, he talks about my religion is kindness. So, we are here together for the second of a two-part series on really evolving our hearts out of hatred, evolving into compassion. And last week we explored how we turn on ourselves, how we turn on ourselves with hatred and aversion and judgment and how to wake up out of that trance.

of self-hatred. And so we're going to explore how we project that outside of ourselves and how we get locked into hating another or disliking another, how they become a bad other. And how do we wake up out of that? And the reality is that most everybody that I've ever med has felt hurt or threatened and out of that feeling of being hurt or threatened has felt a distinct focused aversion towards what they considered the source of it, what was causing the trouble. And a reflexive sense of badness. And there's one story of a woman who approached her psychology professor and asked him, what

could you explain what's a Freudian slip? And the professor's curious and says, well, what makes you ask? And she said, well, the other day I was having lunch with my mother and I meant to ask her to pass assault and instead I said, you damn bitch, you ruined my life. So when we've been hurt, it's in there and we lash out and sometimes it's conscious and sometimes it's unconscious. So the first step is we can only start working with this situation of bad othering

if we're conscious that we're doing it. Okay? We need to know. When it becomes conscious, there's a wisdom in us that gradually draws us to letting go of blame. When we get conscious. And I read a pretty interesting illustration. A woman says,

My daughter and I just had a knock-down, drag-out bedroom hour. Finally, about 10 minutes ago, I put her to bed and through clenched teeth said, I love you, Holland, but not another word tonight. You're going to sleep now. I'm done fussing over stuffed animals. Mommy? I paused on the way out the door and literally biting my tongue. I was so frustrated. What is it, Holland? I do have one more thing to say. Of course she did. She was standing on the bed with her hands on her hips too. Her hair was wild and she was using her arm to wipe her tears and snot away from her face. Mommy, my three-year-old, said,

staring me down with venom in her tiny voice, I forgive you. Then she laid down and cried and honest to goodness for a hutman and I didn't know what to do. The way she said, I forgive you, made it sound like cuss words. I walked over to the bedside and leaned over. Baby girl, do you know what forgiveness means? She was still sniffling.

Her face was shoved deep in her little mermaid pillow. Yes, she muttered. I really had to hear this. It means you are wrong, I'm tired of being mad and now I'm going to sleep and my heart won't have a tummy ache. Think of that. Now I'm going to sleep and my heart won't have a tummy ache. It's brilliant.

There's something in us that knows that as long as we hold on to blame we're going to suffer on some level. So the bad othering that plays out in our personal life and we all do it, we all have people that we think are doing things wrong and we're angry at and they've become the bad other. It also, of course, plays out on a societal level where our unconscious biases and our unfaced fears fuel bad othering of certain other groups of people, whether it's on basis of their skin color, on basis of their religion, on basis of their sexual orientation, are their gender identity, or their socioeconomic class, political view.

We have groups that become bad other, right? So this is very much played out societally. And we might not be aware that our bad othering is causing that tummy ache in the heart, we not be aware of it, but it does keep us small and tight and disconnected from who we really are. We're really looking at this through the lens of awakening on a spiritual path and that othering gets in the way. This is Mother Teresa. She says, if we have no peace, it is because we've forgotten that we belong to each other.

So we're going to focus some on this outward bad othering and I shared last class, Arthur Brooks has a book called Love Your Enemy. And Arthur Brooks is the, he founded a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. And his book and his message is very nonpartisan. It's very beautiful. It's very compassion based. He himself votes in Republican, he's conservative I think for the most part. And he has this message that I think may be the most important phrase I've heard in a long

time that we are in a culture of contempt. This is a culture of contempt right now. And it's a really toxic state what's going on. That contempt means, contempt is a mix of anger and disgust. And it's a way that we put down other... push away others, make them bad. So, these times, if you read the newspaper, you can feel that energy. And I talked to a number of people in the last few weeks.

I've had a lot of calls, a lot of emails, about how much is stirred up. One friend who just shared this, she experienced a lot of trauma from what's gone on, and especially from the news and taking in the news and sent us. me a cartoon. The cartoon has this bird in a cage and the bird is freaked out. It's like fur is all spiked and it's smoking something. It's totally panicked and the owners are talking to each other saying, you know, maybe we shouldn't be layering its cage with a newspaper anymore. So there's a light side and it's disturbing. I'm going to share a bit more of my own story of disturbance. But just to say, one teacher from our community here in Washington

visited with me, and she has been in this country for 38 years, worked at the IMF for 25 years, Latino women, light-skinned Latino woman who, four years ago, when we were having a lot of diversity, inclusivity meetings, wasn't so drawn and didn't consider herself a person of color. Now she does. And she says she understands a lot more because she feels like she's now an outsider. She said to me, I'm one of those immigrants that doesn't belong and is endangered. And then she looked in the eyes and said, Tara, there's a sickness in the soul of our society.

And it's the cruelty and violence that comes from bad othering. And what's important is that we're all susceptible, it's part of each of our psyche. This is not just certain people doing a bad thing. All of us have this conditioning, it's primitive brain conditioning and what's really interesting to watch is that when it's triggered it gets contagious. So the inquiry I'd like to invite us all together in is how am I content? contributing to a culture of contempt. How is my own way of thinking and blaming contributing?

And how can we heal that in a way that really ripples out? Because that's our inquiry. This is a real honest self-examination. Each of us and groups of us are rigged under stress conditioning to get hijacked by the primitive brain and point. We grab for ourselves, we push others aside, and when we're threatened, we push it, we put others down. So the survival brain is alive and well and when it dominates, it does show up as a sickness

in our society. So it's contagious and there's a reactive looping which happens when the violence by some creates anger and reactivity in others and then we make those that are creating bad others into bad others. Does that make sense? When some people are bad othering and causing violence, then other people, then they're bad others for doing that. So we're just continuing the cycle of bad othering. And to me there's a really important teaching here which is it's really natural to respond with anger and upset at bad othering when we detect it. And if we stay and get stuck in our own reactivity, we block our potential for transforming our society.

This is Alan Payton, he's an anti-apartheid activist. He said, there is a hard law. When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive. It's the essence of nonviolent activism. Martin Luther King called it Soul Force and I'll read you one of my most... cherished of what he taught. He said, to our most bitter opponents we say, we shall meet your physical force with soul force.

Do to us what you will and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation is cooperation with good. And he goes on to say, one day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves, we shall so appeal to your heart and conscience

that we shall win yours in the process. This is the same teaching that the Buddhist describe as hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone it sees. This is an ancient and eternal. law. So this is our, this is kind of the framework for what we're going to be exploring more personally and because I'm asking you to look into yourself for, you know, where do you react and how do you work with it? I thought that I would share quite personally my own

experience this week and how I've been trying to work with myself. And as you know I do that sometimes and it's not easy because this is so immediate and raw but I felt like it was important to that last week, I think it was Thursday or towards the end of the week, the president went to El Paso to offer comfort in the wake of a deadly attack against Hispanic people by a person who wanted to stop the invasion of immigrants into this country. And just hours before, as many of you are aware, the administration sent federal agents to meatpacking plants in Mississippi and arrested about 680 mostly Latino immigrants

just a few hours before he went to offer comfort. And there was mass confusion in those communities. The older children were just in their first day of school of these parents that were being hauled away in buses. and imprisoned. And so on the news what I could hear was people yelling, let them go, let them go, their children here, and I could hear children crying. And that's when I just felt this welling up of anger at the cruelty, the tearing apart of the Latino immigrant families. And that the president was choosing to use the same language as used by the terrorist, the invasion

of immigrants, so continuing to create the same atmosphere for violence. So this, it welled up in me a lot of anger. And I went on to, I turned off the news, I said, oh, okay, you know, this is, I could feel it in me, went on, went back to work including writing, talks about peace and love and meditation and everything I do, but there I was in feeling this grimness and this tightness and my heart was like clenched and my anger was very focused. I was very much a bad othering. And then just more and more in the back of my mind, hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone

is healed. Over and over again, hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And it brings tears right now because it's such a truth. It's like, okay, so this body, mind got caught in that tightness. But there's such a bigger truth so I stopped working and I sat down to meditate and I did a few things. The first thing is what I call a U-turn where instead of aiming my anger outward at bad others

I turned it around and I said, okay, what's really going on inside here? And under the anger what I was feeling was a huge amount of fear. fear and powerlessness for the harm being caused to people that are vulnerable, including it's not very many degrees of separation anymore. It's like, you know, friends and their families that close. So fear. And then underneath that was caring and there was mixed into the caring, there's a huge amount of grief.

And so I wept. You know, I went from the... the anger into the weeping and I just sat there as I often do with my hands on my heart and I just cried. What followed that I can return and loop back a little later was some more reflecting and then some action that I felt it might be helpful in our situation, my own little way. But what I want to explore together is this basic grounds of how we wake up out of the the trance that keeps us small that aims blame at maybe a particular person or a group and

come to some larger place of understanding. And that's what I really want to explore and some of you may be thinking, yeah, but outrage and anger is totally appropriate. And because you need the energy to do something and it is appropriate. is intelligent. And I certainly wasn't saying, oh, I shouldn't be angry. In fact, I think we have to listen to our anger. And I know many, many people that are feeling incredibly angry and disturbed. And there's an intelligence that knows that when there's violent speech and violent action against fellow beings, that it's crushing to know that and that we want

help so that it's intelligent and here's one of my favorite lines. This is from a very dear friend and Buddhist teacher Ruth King. She says, anger is initiatory. It is not transformative. Anger is initiatory. It is not transformative. We need the energy, it wakes us up, it alerts us, but then we need to keep on going to what's next. Another teacher of mine, Ruby Sales, who's a civil rights activist and an elder,

she describes non-redemptive anger when you lose access to your deepest intelligence and wisdom, redemptive angers when you get energized but then you move on to out of care acting. So non-redemptive anger, getting stuck in bad othering actually fuels the soul-sick of our society. And there's a wisdom in us that knows what Martin Luther King means by soul force, that knows that when we're really, really alive with caring and when we join hands, that's soul force. We can act out of compassion to make a difference. So what I'd like to do is take a moment to reflect, invite you to check in with yourself because I've shared where I got caught and the work that helped me.

Just to give you a taste of these two steps that we can take, and the first is the U-turn where we come back to what's actually going on inside us. And the second step is to bring a really kind presence to what's here. Only then can we act from soul force. So you might reflect and scan this week, last week, where you might have felt hooked in your own way in bad othering, where you may have felt anger and blame or contempt or hatred or whatever level kind of fixate or hook onto a person or a group.

And as part of checking this thing, out sense what's the worst part of this for you? Really what is most disturbing. So you're honestly recognizing what's going on for you. And for some of you there may not be a, it might not be so externalized on a societal level. Maybe there's a bad othering going on in your immediate relationships and if you'd like to work with that you can too. or you're making somebody else wrong or the enemy.

Since in the worst part. And when you've really gotten in touch with the worst part, what you think is most distressing about this, what most upsets you. And there may be images with it and so on. Making the U-turn and sense how the bad othering feels in your body, what goes on? What's it like when you're blaming or angry? when you feel hate or aversion, that is your heart feel and your mind. And to deepen the attention, you might sense if you weren't caught in the anger,

what underneath that would you have to feel that would be really painful? If you had to put aside the anger and really drop under it, would it be feeling powerless? Would it be feeling hurt? Would it be feeling broken-hearted on behalf of others? Would it be feeling fear that's out of control and it's going to get worse? That you're threatened or others are threatened that you care about? What's under the anger? What's the most vulnerable place under the anger?

And you might even just put your hand on your heart and you pay attention, like what's really there? Holding a very kind presence with whatever vulnerability is there. breathing with it, sensing under that the bad othering is a place of hurt or fear or grief that you can bring tenderness to. Because if you can come home to yourself in this way, feeling the vulnerability and bringing kindness there, then you might be able to sense your intention to be part of the healing to really respond to our world from compassion with that soul force.

If you'd like, you can open your eyes. What we're exploring together is the inner work that evolves us from being dominated or hijacked by hatred. Some of you may have really gotten in touch with really strong, charged bad othering. And other of you may be either tired or distracted or maybe didn't have bad othering going on and that's totally fine. You can just use this as kind of a template for another time. But it's a critical process for all of us at some point if we want to transform our world.

And it takes really deep intention because it's so much easier to go into anger than it is to pause and feel what's underneath. Anger's way easier. So it takes a really deep intention, otherwise we get seduced. And we have to do it over and over. I didn't just do one round this week.

I'm not telling you about one time that I happen to say, oh hatred never sees us by hatred and paused. It was over and over again because I listen to the news every day. I'm pretty addicted these days to it. And I have to listen and then I have to breathe and see where I've gotten smaller and reopen again. What I'd like to do is read you something I read from Gandhi years ago that really stayed with me.

And this is him describing his own spiritual unfolding in this realm. He said, I hold myself to be incapable of hating any being on earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline I have seized for over 40 years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility. Forty years.

Okay? 40 years. But what I love about this is that that was the center of his prayer. Please may this heart awaken to love. May I wake up out of hate. And that's what's possible for us, that we can evolve, we can evolve this heart and the society's heart. So, I want to name some elements that can support us. as we're responding to the sickness and the soul of our society. This is the ground level, coming back again and again to where we know we're in a trance, we know we're reactive, it kind of feels good, it's seductive and we get it. There's a wisdom in us that gets it, that we can't help our world if we stay in it.

There's another piece which is seeking to widen our view. very actively, there's a tendency to think that some individual is at fault, whereas the bad othering comes from energies that move through all of our psyches. It's not like you get rid of one bad individual and things change. It's in our psyches. It's in all of our psyches. It's a delusion and unhelpful to fixate blame. doesn't help.

The other thing is that if you imagine the person that you're blaming for causing harm, okay, if you have somebody in mind whether it's in your personal life, you know, the boss that's being completely unjust and vindictive or if it's in a political world or whatever, if you imagine that person and you imagine living in their body with their mind, they're not, you imagine mind and their heart, wearing the expressions on that particular face. Imagine that. When somebody is seeking power over others, when someone's grasping at wealth, when someone's aggressing, it's not possible for them to feel love or for them to feel wonder or tenderness

or peace. Imagine what it's like to be that person. There's a suffering going on and I don't say this in a sense. sense of always. I mean there may be certain forms of psychopathology where a person doesn't feel the suffering that goes along with greed and hatred and delusion, but most of us do to some degree. So for me after I went through that kind of like hatred never seizes by hatred but by love alone is healed and kind of did that U-turn and opened. I started to then try to widen my view.

And I would imagine when somebody was saying those words, invasion of immigrants, and quiet and actually sensed it, I could sense that there are for so many a very real fear of losing physician role power and meaning. meaning. And Ruby Sales described this as the spiritual crisis of white America. Ruby Sales again is the civil rights activist I referred to. And I want to read you a little bit of what she says. She says, it's a spiritual crisis of white America and it's the calling of this time. She says, I don't hear anyone speaking to the 45-year-old person in Appalachia who's dying of a young age, who feels like they've been eradicated because, I don't hear anyone speaking to the 45-year-old person in Appalachia who's dying

of a young age who feels like they've been eradicated because whiteness is so much smaller today than it was yesterday. What is it that public theology can say to that white person in Massachusetts whose hair are addicted because they feel their lives have no meaning because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? She talks about her theology is a theology of love. She says, I love everybody. I love everybody.

in my heart and you can't make me hate you and you can't make me hate you in my heart." And that's from a black spiritual. She goes on to describe her mantra or her way of moving through the world now. And this is not that long ago that she kind of had this shift where she says when she sees somebody that's in trouble or that's acting and causing trouble she asks the question, Where does it hurt? So she can see beyond the mask of bad other, where does it hurt? And if you look in your own life, and now we're talking personally at somebody you're angry

at and you're blaming, and you first do the U-turn and take care of your own heart, you can start looking at them and asking that question and it widens your view. You start getting that they're struggling too. You become bigger. So that's one piece, is widening your view. The second piece I want to name is that to begin to feel that sense of soul force we actually need to act. That compassion, the mature version of compassion, has some action.

It can be through our prayers, it can be through our conversations with each other, it can be through what we write, it can be through rallies, it can be through whatever it is and certainly through voting, please, please vote. But we need to act. And that's the fruition on the Bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being, is to feel compassion and from that compassion act. And in these days it means acting on behalf of those that are being violated. that may not have a voice.

These times really are calling us to stand up for the most vulnerable. It feels really deep in my heart to say that. I was reading again a lot of Martin Luther King over the last week. One of the things that struck me, he said, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strong and clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. We have to act if we want to be true to ourselves on some level. Everybody's going to have a different way.

Mostly it helps to be able to act and be part of acting with others. I found for myself that if I feel like some lone voice or I'm huddled by my myself, you know, it's burnout. But when I feel an energy with others, a caring together, when I remember how many people care, all of a sudden, oh my gosh, that's soul force. A friend of mine was telling me about being out visiting the redwoods. And as you know, redwood trees are these majestic, amazing huge trees. And he, he was telling me about being out visiting the redwoods. And, as you know, redwood trees are these majestic, amazing huge trees. and he found out that they had very shallow root system, which he thought was really interesting.

So the friend that was showing him, taking them on this kind of tour, he asked her, well, how did they manage to stand so tall? And as it turns out, redwoods grow in clusters and they interlock their roots. And I kind of want to close on that note that there's a lot of forces to to trigger us into the primitive brain that feels separate, threatened, and reactive. And if we want to keep evolving consciousness, we really need the togetherness.

We need to interlock our roots and our hearts and our caring and create the world we believe in. We need to do it together. One teacher, Andrew Harvey, said, whatever, you know, find your own, the area that works for you, realizing all beings are part of our heart. So it may be those that are being violated. I don't even like the word immigrants, those who have immigrated, which is all of us at some generation or another, right? Other species, stand up for other species, stand up for our earth. Andrew Harvey put it this way, he said, follow your heartbreak.

Follow your heartbreak. And hold hands as you're doing it because we really need to do that, to feel that soul force. The trick is not to get a sense of it's not about me, not to remove ourselves. Martin Himola Lutheran pastor who opposed the Nazis in the 1930s wrote this. He said, first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

We need to act, not out of hatred, but because we belong together, because we care. There's a woman that went to the Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda and when she came back she had written down what was engraved on one plaque and she sent it to me. Here's what she found, if you knew me and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me. There's a connectedness that we'll discover but we each need to dedicate like Gandhi did. You know, just have it be our prayer. Please may I evolve out of that hatred. Please may I remember the love.

It means every day when we catch ourselves getting in the trance, some part of us says, wait a minute, hatred never seizes by hatred. By love alone is healed. the U-turn and bring the kindness inward and then look again, widen our view, hold hands and act. So let's take a few moments to close together, inviting yourself into presence and taking a moment to scan and sense if there's any way you've turned on yourself that you're holding against yourself right now. If there's any way that you're making yourself a bad other, the intention

from your own wisdom heart to let go of blame, to breathe with what feels vulnerable, and to offer some gesture of kindness to yourself, some words, some reminder, open your heart to yourself. And feeling that same intention to evolve and to love, you might sense where there's something between you and feeling connected with another person in your life, now, just anybody that comes to mind.

And without knowing the pathway from here to there, just sense really your aspiration. May there be more loving, maybe feel your own vulnerability in the relationship, what feels what's hurting, where you feel fear, disappointment, hold that with kindness. And perhaps now or at some point in the not distant future you can look at them and in some way ask that question, where does it hurt and sense how they're struggling to. If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. We'll close with a shared prayer to sense the beings in our life, those that we know, those that we don't know, all those that are vulnerable right now and afraid, all those that

are closed and cut off, all those beings everywhere that are struggling for survival. We hold in our heart the earth our mother in all beings. May all beings awaken to the loving presence as their very essence. May all beings be held in loving presence. all beings be happy, know the natural joy of being alive. May all beings touch a great and natural peace. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth.

May there be peace on earth and peace everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.