Tara Brach - Part 2 - Wise Intention--Living in Truth

Episode Date: October 10, 2012

2012-10-10 - Part 2 - Wise Intention--Living in Truth - Evolution has conditioned us to identify as an egoic self and to protect that identity. A key strategy is trying to control how others perceive us through pretense and deception. This talk explores the ways we disarm though dedicating ourselves to truthfulness, forgiving our defenses and taking a chance to name and make room for the vulnerability we have been armoring. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Last weekend, I helped to lead a retreat for teens, ages 13 to 18, it was down in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And this talk really came out of that experience. And the weekend was one of, as we do here, practicing mindfulness, practicing presence. And so they brought the mindfulness also into movement. And then we'd go into small groups where then they'd practice. staying present and sharing with each other some of their experiences and listening,

holding a space for each other. And the depth of the sharing was quite beautiful, real taking that risk to speak of the real struggles in their lives, whether it was loneliness or, you know, their body image, addictive behaviors, feelings of depression or stress. And the safety that in that presence they held for each other really, really influenced me. I was just very touched by the power of the kind of community that these teens developed, just in a weekend, a sense of real safety and care amongst the whole group. So I was particularly in a way touched by, you know, we're in the same.

season right now where it's so obvious that in our culture and this in the kind of political adversarial tone all the spin all the hype that it's it's all presentation and the contrast of being with a group of people that were young and so undefended I think that's what hit me that there was just the layers of defensiveness had not caked on the persona and the presentation had not hardened and it was quite powerful to see. So as I mentioned, the contrast for me last week with all the debates and everything and then going and being with teens who were just themselves, the realness, the courage to be real. And also the contrast, I think that many of us probably feel and know in our own

how our daily habits get kind of locked in. in a way and we have our own style of presentation, of being somebody and of trying to prove something or the little fabrications, the little manipulations, our own defendedness. So I was moved by this power, the possibility of letting down armor and what can happen when we do. What can happen when we take the chance to be less defended? And I wanted to share because it reminded me when I got back a story I read many years ago that Pama Chowdrin talked about how a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was brought, his mother had asked that he attend, he was from LA and he was involved with gangs and he had a real attitude

you know kind of a chip on a shoulder and a swagger and a sneer and so on and his mom was hoping to kind of get him out of the violence of gang life and so she asked that he go to Boulder and be part of a gathering Chogam Trunkba held in the Rocky Mountains give him a summer there you know and so the hope was that he really it would give him a little bit of a shift a different attitude and the people that he was staying with were loosely affiliated with the Buddhist community so it was a culture shock I'd say you know so here's what happened one day he came to

an event where Chogh M. Trunkpah was there and at the end of the event Chogunthpa sang the Shambala anthem now this is what Pam Choddin writes she says this was an awful experience for the rest of us because for some reason he loved to sing the Shambala anthem in a high pick squeaky and cracked voice. This event was outside and he sang into a microphone and the sound travel for miles across the planes. And in the midst of it, Juan, this 15-year-old broke down and started crying. Everyone else was just feeling awkward or embarrassed, but Juan just started to cry.

Later he said he cried because he had never seen anyone that brave. He said, that guy, he's not afraid to be a fool. He's not afraid to be a fool. That turned out to be a major turning point in his life because he realized he didn't have to be afraid to be a fool either. All that persona and chip on the shoulder were guarding his soft spot and he could let them go. And because he was so sharp and bright he got the message, his life did turn around and now

he's got his education, he's back in LA helping kids. So we get this sense that we might not have quite the exaggerated persona. he came to Boulder with, but there's this way that we're covering up so we don't appear a fool or appear, whatever it is we don't want to appear. And that the pathway, and I felt the teens were just so beautiful at showing that, is to be willing to expose that vulnerability, that soft spot, which really is the pathway into our aliveness and our compassion and our hearts. So, I often think of the spiritual path as we're not trying to become somebody more. We're not trying to add anything, add some shine in any way.

We're actually undoing the trappings, undoing all that personhood and all the defenses and all the strategies that block who we are. It's an undoing. And in the most basic way, we're letting go of whatever we're holding, onto that hides who we are and that stops us from loving and stops us from being true to ourselves. And the practice really is through presence. Presence disarms us. We're here, we're listening, we're involved in these practices of mindfulness in some deep way to disarm,

to uncover, to come back home to a kind of purity or innocence, because I'm that was what I was feeling this week and there's an innocence that comes through. And we get jaded. We don't feel it in ourselves because we're so used to walking around with the armoring. So what I'd like to do in this class, and then we can follow up next week because I realize it's a subject that's broad and it brings up a lot of questions. So if there's questions, we can explore them together at the next class. But what I'd like to do tonight is explore a bit of how come it's so hard to disarm, to be less defended.

Okay? And I'd also like to explore what helps us to take the chance, because it feels like taking a chance. We're always playing our edge on this path in a way. What helps us to take the chance and a little bit to touch into the blessings of an undefended heart. So one thing to consider as we explore, because I'll be describing more what I mean by our defendedness, how we don't let the truth of who we are out, we cover up, we pretend. So I'm going to be naming that more and asking you to examine for yourself your own sense of your level of truthfulness.

Now, in a deep way it's truthfulness with yourself. It always comes down to that. But tonight we're going to be emphasizing that truthfulness with each other. And I'd like to invite you to look at that without judgment, with really the spirit of curiosity. Just see it. Just to begin with, the research is done. There's been a lot of research on the art of deception and self-deception.

and just to pull out one piece of research in one setup and one field experiment, researchers had strangers get together and talk to each other for 10 minutes, and they recorded the conversation. And then afterwards they told, you know, they asked them how honest they felt they had been, and subjects reported a feeling that they felt completely honest and accurate in that 10-minute conversation. But then they played the tape, and as they listened to it, they were able to identify where they had steered away from the truth. And they did it in 10 minutes an average of almost three times, three falsehoods in 10 minutes. That's a lot. Just 10 minutes?

Three lies? So it's actually 2.92 false things that they told, just to say it exactly. It's reflexive and unconscious the amount we lie. And I can say for myself that as as I've described before, whenever I'm reflecting on a topic, I really apply it to myself and watch myself. And I was once again really surprised and not pleased with the degree to which I found myself tossing in little things that I'd say, why did I say that? That wasn't really exactly right. But I'll get back to that. I will. I confess, I like to. The basic point that I'll be making is that we are always trying to make an impression. In some way, we move through the world trying to control how others perceive us and how

others perceive things. And we try to control people, other people's perceptions so that we can convince them to like us or to be interested in us or else to buy something or else to vote a certain way? I mean, this is just this is the way we try to control life is to control people's perceptions. And sometimes it's done as a living. In one story, there's a magician who's working on a cruise ship

and he has a parrot who's always ruining his act. He's always saying in the middle of the trick, the cards up his sleeve, or he's got a dove in his pocket or he slipped it through the hole in his hat, you know. So one day the ship sank and the parrot and the magician

found themselves together on a life rat. And for several days the parrot is sitting silent, he's just staring at the magician. And then finally the fourth day the parrot says, okay, I give up. What'd you do with the ship? So not only do we try to create impressions, people are inclined to believe the impression. In fact, the way the brain goes, and this is part of cognitive science, is that we believe things before we disbelieve things. So you can put out a mistruth.

truth and it gets in there in the brain and it takes work to undo it so it sticks even though it's not true let's look a bit at the root of our impulse to control others perceptions okay and it comes as as you might imagine it comes from a limited and insecure self-perception that when we I mean, we each come into this world, we each in every organism has a sense of separateness. And as humans, we develop a small self-identity. We develop this egoic identity. And what happens is this is a story that grows about who we are and our importance or lack of importance and our flaws and our virtues and so on. And with any egoic story, with any self-identity, hand in hand, we have a toolkit on how to protect it. If there's a sense of self,

there's also a toolkit on how to protect that self. It's in our nervous system. We know the basic ingredients are fight, flight, and freeze. And the ingredient we're going to talk about tonight, the component of that toolkit that's very central, and it's not just us, it's to the whole animal kingdom is deception. In other words, we use deception, we use creating impressions in order to protect our self-identity. Because inherently, it feels insecure. If we feel separate, we feel like we need something that we don't have and that others could in some way hurt us. It feels real like that. So we have to protect. So we do it by misrepresentation. and we modulate our behaviors in order to try to get what we want and avoid what we don't want,

which includes ways that we cooperate or try to meet expectations and put ourselves into shapes and forms that really aren't the truth of who we are. We try to meet expectations in order to get approval. We're untrue to ourselves. another parrot story since I'm on a parrot role this guy gets a parrot for his birthday but this parrot

is full grown he's got a really bad attitude and he's just he curses all the time okay so the vocabulary is really bad and he's also very rude and so this guy tries to change the bird's attitude in all sorts of

ways he speaks to him politely and he plays really nice music and he does a lot of meditation yoga around him and so on, but nothing works. So finally he yells at the bird and it gets worse. You know, he shakes the bird and the bird gets madder and rudder. So they're in bad shape. Finally in a moment of desperation, this guy takes the parrot and puts him in the freezer. Okay? All right, so then there's all this, the bird squawking and kicking and screaming and then suddenly all's quiet. The guy gets frightened that he might have actually hurt the bird and

quickly opens the freezer door. The parrot calmly steps out onto his extended arm and says, I'm so sorry that I offended you with my language and actions. I do ask for your forgiveness. I will try to check my behavior. Guys astonished at this quick change in attitude. I was about to ask what changed and when the parrot continued, may I ask what the chicken did? So we know that we enter this world and actually the more we encounter a difficult world, a hostile world, the more we can form our behaviors and our speech to try to get what we want and to avoid punishment. And again, this is where we end up misrepresenting ourselves. So now, we come by these strategies honestly. I mean, they're really part of our

evolutionary development. And if you read, you know, about animals and animal strategies for survival, it's amazing how many of them in some way are using, creating a misleading impression in order to make it. So we know the obvious ones like that viruses camouflage themselves and we know other creatures camouflage themselves to not be seen just the way we do. We try to conform or be invisible or not make waves so that we don't get in trouble. We know how cats raise their fur to create an impression of being bigger than they are. And we know that humans like Juan in the story

have that kind of chip on the shoulder, machismo, whatever. So those are the most obvious. It was interesting to me how much mimicry goes on. We know how we mimic in order to be perceived a certain way. So particularly fish and reptiles, they engage in there's a lot of female mimicry. My favorite story is the garter snake males. So they can emit this spheromone that suggests that they're female,

but they only do it for a couple of days after they emerge from their winter den. And apparently the goal is to get warm. The way it happens is garter snakes end up forming this mating balls of 100 males are more around real females. So there's 100 males around a real female. So when this male pretends to be a female, He gets to be at the center of this ball, this mating ball. So he's doing it to warm up.

And as soon as he's warmed up, he turns off the pheromones and goes back to being a guy. But isn't that great, you know, that he's doing it for a hug, you know? I think it's so cool. Okay, so there's these... I'll share a few more just because I think they're fascinating. There's an orchid in the Amazon that attracts male flies by mimicking females. No, it's part of the orchid itself, looks like a female.

the male tries to copulate with this part of the orchid. And when it does, it ends up pollinating the orchid. So that's how the orchid gets pollinated. And then the South American Crab Spider. I'm reading a book about the Amazon that talks a lot about the Amazon, where there's so much competition for resources that the strategies are extravagant. It's like unbelievable. So, all right, the South American Crab Spider, it kills an ant,

it consumes the ants body but leaves the shell intact. It puts the shell over it. It's smaller than an ant. And then by putting the carcass over its own body, it looks like prey, and it's prey, it attracts new victims. So that's just another interesting one. I mean, you've seen the fish and the butterflies that have another, an extra eye, so the attack doesn't happen where their heads are.

So this is a really major way of protecting and, furthering life is to pretend. So if we feel like, you know, how unethical are we for lying and misrepresentation, that's how we come by it. And the truth is that when you think about it revealing vulnerability in so many climates actually seems contraindicated. I mean if you, they've done studies on the kind of face and posturing that political can't candidates have to have in order to get a certain number of votes. And if people think they're vulnerable, if they don't project a certain competence and machismo and strength and I can

dominate, they won't get elected. It just won't happen. So it's not easy to put down these tools we use of pretending. We know with children that the more threatened they feel, the more they lie to avoid punishment. We do the same. Thomas Sowell wrote, there are only two ways of telling the complete truth. Anonymously and posthumously. Now that's a very, it's actually, it's amusing,

but it's also very deep. So we're going to come back to this. Anonymously, well, we can't tell the truth if we're really identified with our separate self-sense. because telling the truth is undermining to the separate self. The separate self, if it tells the truth, will feel too threatened. So you have to start sensing who you are a little bit beyond that egoic self

to begin to be free to speak truth. That's the anonymously. And then posthumously, in a similar way, you know, if we're caught in fight-flight, if we're in that kind of primitive defend this life mode, it won't be safe enough. So there really has to be a sense of the possibility of being free from defending life in the moment to begin to really speak truth. Now we're going to, if that sounds abstract, we're going to come back to that. But just to acknowledge that it's part of our karmic situation to have to take care of this particular life

to at times have to defend and pretend. So the inquiry is, well, when do we really get to speak truth? The understanding is that there are many times, and if you kind of go into some of the inquiry into what the Buddha meant by wise speech, he said it's true and it's helpful. And that's a very nuanced understanding. because there's many things that feel true to us but wouldn't be helpful to say.

Do you know what I mean? I mean, it would be hurtful. The other person would not be in a place to understand or work with us on it. There may be something about ourselves that feels very vulnerable and to bring it to the wrong people truly would be undermining ourselves. We'd get hurt. Wouldn't serve. So it's not this blanket thing of, you know,

if we're really going to be free, we should always speak truth. And, like so many evolutionary strategies, the degree of defense and pretense that we are adapted to is outmoded and it's a developmental arrest if we can't wake up from it. We cannot continue in this evolutionary process of awakening consciousness if we spend so much of our time and energy, consciously perpetrating that behavior of presenting a self. Does that make sense? I'm going to check around a little. You can nod or you can go like this.

I'm scanning. In the moments that we're in that role, in a persona, feeling like we need to prove something or cover something, in that moment we cannot perceive who we really are. We're hooked on the ego self and we cannot sense who's looking through, who's there, what is there behind the mask. In the moments that we're pretending or defending, we can't sense love. We're disconnected.

We can't see who we are. And we intuitively know this. I mean, if you think of a time recently where you were in some way trying to something or fluff your resume in some way and I mean that really broadly you know kind of impress or gain respect we all know that kind of sense of trying to show off or show up well and we're not at home in any sense of real wholeness or there's not a sense of genuineness and if we contrast that to moments that we're with somebody that where there's a sense of acceptance and

safety and we're really just being who we are we're just just resting in a real feeling of truthfulness, the soft spot is exposed. We know that that's when our innocence and our purity and our beingness is more accessible. We know. So how do we begin to more and more cut through that unconscious pretending motion and live for more truthfulness is the inquiry? And the first and biggest step is start to really see when we're living in those strategies. Seeing is freeing.

Seeing goes to degrees. You can see it and have a kind of glancing sight of, oh yeah, I was kind of, that was a little fib there. Or you can see and really get, oh, that was coming from this kind of tight, anxious self-sense, fearing not enough, trying to prove, and really sense. Oh, and it's just such a small sliver of beingness. And in a way feel that sorrow that we're living inside a part of our being that's so much smaller than the whole.

Seeing is freeing. So let's look at the ways we pretend. Let's just take a look at the different ways that we do it. I'd say the two main ways that we present ourselves. One is by withholding pertinent information. It's what we withhold. And the other one is real different degrees of distortion. And you can sense if you imagine a friend of yours or perhaps your partner, family where

there's not a real sense of closeness, you sense the possibility but it's not happening, you might ask yourself, you know, what is it that I'm not revealing? What is it I'm not expressing? How am I protecting the soft spot in this relationship? You know what I mean by the soft spot? You know the places in me that feel insecure or embarrassed or hurting or in some way I'm afraid to have seen. What are we covering?

Are we covering that we're feeling depressed a lot and we don't want somebody to know or that we're lonely? Are we covering an extremely? addiction. There's a lot of sneaking around addiction that creates distance and relationship. What are we holding back about ourselves because we're afraid of what another will think or we're afraid that they can't handle it or whatever it is we're afraid of that's creating distance? That's the first inquiry. Just to begin to sense that. Now the other level is outright distortion and again of course it comes in degrees.

leading, sometimes we just exaggerate achievements and are exaggerate problems or sometimes there's the little fabrications, they call them white lies, I don't even like that expression, but there is that statement that when we get into white lies and we're not conscious of them, we become colorblind. It just becomes a way of life. So are they the fabrications to avoid doing things or to excuse behaviors? How often? are we justifying ourselves in some way? Okay? How often do we threaten something to have others, you know, threaten our withdrawal of our affection or some punishment, let's say with children, to get them to cooperate? This is Carol Leifer. She says, whenever I travel,

I like to keep the seat next to me empty. I found a great way to do it when someone walks down the aisle and says to you as someone sitting there, just say, no one except the Lord. So, earlier I mentioned how when I'm reflecting on a talk I start monitoring myself so I've been monitoring you know myself on pretense and so on and on the mini fabrications and I watch and I notice how when I get more stressed there is without even knowing it often this this real strong inclination to in some way excuse myself with you know a little exaggeration of what's going on, what the timing of things is, why I can't do this at this time. It's because that's my issue. My issue is I'm never doing enough, I'm not showing up enough.

So the lies, the deceptions come around, how come to so that nobody will be upset with me? And to watch that, and one of the ones I noticed, oh I hope I, none of you, I hope I never said it to one of you, but one of the ones I noticed was in July, Derachia, show, the storm, a tree fell in our house. And it has kind of created pretty much chaos, about a third of the house got squash. So we still have construction workers there and we still have people trying to repair, I mean, trees cleaning up a whole mess. So it was bad. It wasn't terrible. And it's being covered by insurance, but it was a hassle. But I noticed in so many conversations when somebody was wanting or expecting something, just throwing in about that tree

crushing my house. Didn't make a direct link, but you know, because it sounds so good. But you get the idea. It was like I was tossing in something to create an impression to excuse something that really didn't directly connect. Okay, I've confessed. So it sounds light, but there's actually something insidious about it because it reinforces a sense of a self that needs to manipulate to make her way through. It reinforces a small egoic identity, one that actually, that's suffering. It's suffering because in those moments I'm not living in a larger realization. There are so many ways we pretend. I think often of our, I mean our culture drives it into us. Whatever our culture values, we have to try to pretend in some way so we look okay according to those standards.

the culture values education and being knowledgeable. So kids very early get the message that in class it's good to know a lot, it's good to be right, it's bad to be wrong, it's bad to not know. What does that leave us with? You know, we go around and it's really dangerous to not be, not to not know things. This is from one test for children at school. The question was, named six animals which live specifically in the Arctic. The response.

Two polar bears and three, and then there's a cross off, four seals. That's not a great answer. Two polar bears and four seals. What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for? Response. He's a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles. What happens during puberty to a boy? response. He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery. What is a vibration? There are good

vibrations and bad vibrations. Good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s. So having answers for things. So when we start looking honestly, we start noticing how much we pretend. It might be that we pretend to agree with others or pretend to be interested in the same thing. They're the kind of social pretences. We pretend we know things we don't know much about or we pretend that we're less intelligent and less gifted that we are. We are to cover up in some way or more, or that we're weaker or more powerful. So we'll just take a moment because I've been throwing out a lot of ways that we have from our toolkit to deceive and you might just close your eyes for a moment and just reflect a bit. Again, bringing curiosity to this pause.

One very brief reflection that can help to reveal a little about this is if you bring to mind somebody you respect, somebody whose opinion really matters to you and who you might feel a little insecure around. And you might ask yourself, what is it I want this person to see about me, to know about me, what's the impression I want to create? And what do I do toward that end. Just to get a kind of sense of the persona, the self-story, the presentation, you might ask similarly, what is I don't want that person to see about me? And what do I do to hide that? Knowing that it's very rare that we're with each other with no agenda, that we're totally undefended and open, and that this is really part of our

the design in a way to try to control other people's perceptions and that if we can begin to notice how we do it, that mindfulness itself creates a space to open out of that behavior. We have some choice to know that in the moments that we're in some way trying to impress, trying to control, that we're really not living from our wholeness, from our creativity, from our wisdom, from our heart. So the inquiry now to deepen is how do we disarm? How do we let that seeing and freeing happen? And if you'd like to open your eyes, it's fine. Our basic training, what we do here, meditation, is a training in disarming. in any moment with meditation, the very, the name of this kind of meditation is Vaphasana,

and the translation is to see clearly. So in the moments of seeing clearly, we're not as identified with the self who's trying to defend, rather we're resting in the awareness that's seeing that. We begin to loosen the identification. We begin to kind of take away some of the strength of that defensive, project. So meditation teaches us to notice what's happening to step out of the story. The story meaning I'm this self, it's my narrative, I need to show this person that I'm intelligent or successful, I need to attract this person or get this person interested or make sure this person

doesn't see this. We step out of the storyline, see it as a story, and come into presence, come into the place where there's actually aliveness, clarity, spontaneity. So that's the practice. And to live in that truth with each other means to take that same process of noticing, of letting go of the storyline, of coming into the moment, into our bodies, our hearts, taking that into our time with each other. What so inspired me about the weekend was that because it had a mix of meditation and then being mindfully with each other, that became a more fluid process. Experience what's true right here and be able to start practice naming it instead of solidifying into our personas that want to show off something.

So we begin to start bringing mindfulness to shine the light on our strategies so that we don't have to live them out. Now I'd like to, the last part of this evening is to describe what I consider to be the three key elements that really can support us in this more conscious truthfulness with each other. and the three elements are intention. Whenever I say there's three da-da-da-da-da-da, intention's usually going to be in there. Intention. And that means intention to be consciously aware, to start noticing. An intention to play our edge, to take the chance to be a little more real. Take the chance to look like a fool.

take the chance to have the soft spot be felt. Okay, that's intention, and I'm going to speak a little more about that. The second is compassion towards our habit of armoring, and then the third is actually practicing, naming, and allowing what's true in the moment. Okay, intention really comes down to, if you're listening and something in your heart knows, this really matters.

there is a habit of keeping a separateness with other people and of trying to control things. And there is the potential of a lot of intimacy and freedom by taking that chance to be more real. If you sense that, if you sense that it matters, then there'll be a sincerity to your intention. It'll be there. But it takes consciousness because there's such strong conditioning

to go into our trance of being defended. One of the things I love about wedding ceremonies is that the vows that people make often touch on this level of let's commit to being real. And I know when Jonathan and I got married, probably the centerpiece of the ceremony was a quote by RELCA that I love. And it goes like this. It says, I want to unfold. let no place in me hold itself closed for where I am closed I am false I want to stay clear in your sight

I want to unfold let no place in me hold itself closed for where I am closed I am false I want to stay clear in your sight so we sense this intention to take a chance to open to be clear in your sight, whether you're thinking of it's God's sight, just in the clear in the presence of our own awareness of each other, clear means transparent, means letting the light and the truth of who we are be there.

So that's part one, is an intention that really to counter-conditioning really needs to be a regular part of our meditation practice. The second is really important, which is to forgive our strategies. The reason I took the time on the animals is because it's not our fault. It's just not our fault that we lie. It's not our fault that we pretend. It doesn't mean, I'm not saying that we can't transform. Seeing does free us. But it's not our fault.

is deeply wired into our nervous system to protect ourselves. So we need to forgive. And I'll talk more about that as I describe one of my own experiences, but just to say that adding the second arrow of saying I'm phony or I'm a hypocrite or I'm a coward or I should be able to be more honest than I am squeezes the trap tighter. We feel worse about ourselves and then we actually act in a more defended way. So what's going on in a moment of deception is we're scared in some way.

What's going on in a moment of pretense is we're insecure. In some way we're like that cat that needs to bristle and look bigger or we're like that garter snake that wants a hug. We're trying to get something, right? So it's being forgiving. So intention, forgiving, and then starting to name and allow what's true to ourselves and to each other. And the story I'd like to share of my own is that I had a very painful, all of a sudden kind of realization of just how much I pretense I lived in went after, it was a few years after I moved into an ashram, our spiritual community.

And I had made an error in some advertising. I was in charge of the yoga center and I was promoting an event, made an error that just, thousands of copies of something went out with something wrong on it. And I got down on myself, but to others I was defensive. And then I got down on myself for being defensive. And then something cracked apart and I went into this, and I wrote about this in True Refuge. So those of you that read True Refuge or hear this story, my perfection project collapsed. I had gone, I had been going about trying to be this spiritual person who did things well and was calm when things didn't go well and certainly was not defensive and who just looked good.

And I just did not, I just saw how many moments I was trying to create that impression. And how many moments I was exaggerating about things. Oh, I had, yes, I had 40 people in my yoga class when there was really 27 or, you know, in some way, you know, acting like I was helpful and concerned about others but actually being really selfish about what hours I was going to do the work and then have time for myself or whatever it was in some way I was pretending to be something I wasn't and what I did with that first was in true to form as I got very disgusted and added the second arrow of well I'm not only not spiritual I'm a total hypocrite and then I so it was one of those breakdowns or everything fell apart well my intent

intention was there. My intention was to get more real, even if it didn't look good. So we had a kind of women's group that was meeting and I did a whole confession. I said, I know I look like I'm giving and I'm this and I'm that, but actually I'm really selfish and I'm just, I did that whole thing. There was so much self-aversion though that I left feeling and really ashamed. I didn't feel relieved. But naming it out loud, continue the cracking open in some way. And I remember the night after that evening starting to just be present with what was underneath all that pretense, just be present. I just kept saying, okay, just let this be here. And I started seeing all the different self stories going on

that I was, you know, the yoga teacher self, the self that was dedicated to helping and serving, the self who was better than others at yoga, the self who was selfish, the self who was pretending. And in, as the night went on and in the kind of just bearing witness, I just started seeing these as just a whole bunch of characters and none of them were who I was. I wasn't the bad self who had been pretending. I wasn't the good yogi self. I was none of them. The eye, there was no words for really other than just a kind of tender presence. Tremendous amount of forgiving and just a presence. So they were all roles. They weren't the truth of who I was. And after that night, it became clear to me that I needed to be really intentional. If I wanted to

keep remembering that depth, I needed to be really intentional of naming with other people what was true. That would keep me connected with the depth. If I could name the soft spot, I could come back to, hey I'm not even the person who's vulnerable. So I had a friend in the ashram that I just began playing that edge I'd say things I was really uncomfortable about. I just began playing the edge. And every time I would do that,

I would find that there wasn't as much of a sense of that was me. It was still a true behavior. I was still acting in ways that were maybe not so wholesome. But there wasn't so much identification. I actually had more freedom than how I would behave. I'd like to read you one of the favorite, my favorite understandings from Adrian Rich. She says, in an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love, it's a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other.

An honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. So as a way of closing, there's a real blessing in taking the chance to be truthful. And the blessing is when we're not so defended and we're truthful, we can begin to discover our connection with each other. and we can discover who we are beyond any of the stories or the narratives. There's more innocence, more realness.

This is Mark Nippo. He says, we waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doornaub feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another person soft and unrepeatable so just take these last few moments invite you to close your eyes

sit back and sense in this moment what it might mean to let go of anything that's between you and presence this is the disarming this is the real core of it anything that's between you and just to notice it and invite yourself to arrive feel your breath feel your livelness sense this invitation of the spiritual path, this intention to disarm and in a way, in the deepest way it means with each other that we're willing to not know how to act. We're willing to experience what this moment is like disarmed of any strategy. What would that be like? We don't know. In the moments that the walls come down, the truth of our being is free to express in a unique way. Love is free to flow. Our truthfulness shines through.

We close with a very simple prayer, a loving kindness prayer, that these hearts and minds might awaken, that we may touch presence and live from presence, that we might be with each other in a way that expresses the truth of who we are, undefended. blended, loving, and awake. May all beings everywhere open to this truthfulness. May this world, may this world be healed and freed as we open our hearts and minds to each other and to life. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the

the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.