Tara Brach - Power of Prayer: From Longing to Belonging (2017-11-08)

Episode Date: November 11, 2017

Power of Prayer: From Longing to Belonging (2017-11-08) - When we bring a full presence to prayer, it becomes a powerful pathway of homecoming. This talk explores how prayer heals the pain of separation, and offers practical guidance in what poet John O'Donohue calls "unearthing our ancient belonging." "What's it like if you bow your head and whisper and call on something larger?" Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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. I'm regularly asked by students about where devotion fits into this path and particularly prayer. I'm curious, how many of you pray? Can I see by hands? I'm seeing about 50% and And how many for you is it a very regular part of your path that you really sense it as central to your path? Can I see it by hands again? Hands high. Helps me to see.

30% maybe, 20. So, according statistics, over 55% people pray in this United States. And most of them silently, most of them on their own. So what I'd like to do is talk about where prayer fits in a path of mindfulness. What really do we mean by mindful prayer or prayer with presence? And often mindfulness is introduced in a way as a kind of extracted from its spiritual traditional roots and offered as a technique. You know, you pay attention this way and you note this or you name that and you do this and this

happens and many people find that at the really deep compelling poignant moments of their life during births and deaths and celebrations and crisis that all drops away and it's in some deep way it's like oh please you know there's some deep prayerfulness that gets contacted and that it arises really naturally it's just a response and I was fascinated when I heard the story told about Ram Dass, who some of you or most of you probably know of one of the icons of this generation in terms of first bringing a lot of the spiritual practices to the West. And he had a massive stroke some years back. And at the time of his stroke as he lay there really helpless, you know, he tried to pull on some of his practices,

you know, mindfulness and self-compassion and all the others. And he said, nothing worked at all in those critical moments. And in fact, the way he put it, he said, I flunked the test. Then what he did in those moments was he began to pray. And he prayed to his guru who was no longer alive and just completely gave himself to that. And he said that as he prayed, his guru's presence, the sense of the beloved became palpably present.

to him and everything that was going on, you know, all the pain and the powerlessness and the shock of his experience, it wasn't like it felt good but there was something that could hold it. He had really found his way through prayer back to a sense of some universal loving presence. So how do we make sense of that? How does that fit in with what we explore in terms of learning to bring presence into our daily life. And one of the expressions I love, and this is from one teacher, Srinargarata is, says, the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. That our mind can, through

our judgments and our figuring and our computing and all, we get lost in it, the trance and we create a real distance between ourselves and what we cherish, a sense of connection. A sense of connectedness and then the heart can cross it. And so what we'll be exploring is how with presence our prayer can help us cross the abyss, reconnect. Now, as you can imagine, there's different levels of prayer. I really enjoy this from, because we're all layered and how deep we're going in any given moment. But these are some prayers that I have some fun with that are from children. I'll just read you

a couple of them. Dear God, please make my parents understand that if I don't eat salad, I do better at school. Please forgive me for hiding my sister's favorite doll. And please don't tell her where it is. Dear God, I hope my dog is with you in heaven. Please take care of him. Sorry if you choose on your sandals. One more. Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I asked for was a puppy. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up. So what are we praying for when we pray? Joseph Campbell describes how the beginning of every religion starts with the word help. Because in some fundamental way, it's an existential thing. We sense our separation. and there's some fear of what's going to happen to us.

And we sense how we're fragile and that we're dependent. So that's like in the deep level it's like help, please, may I survive, may I flourish. And then our longing day by day, that deep sense of help or what we want gets hitched on shallower levels, whether we're wanting a puppy. or whether we're calling out in the moment for relief from a migraine or something or whether we're saying, oh, please may I get that job or may this go well for my child or whatever. But the deepest prayer, and if we really trace back, the deepest prayer is to find some refuge in love.

If you are at the end of your life and you really imagine into those moments like what most matters, in some way we want to feel belonging to something larger in a loving way. Loving connection. This is John O'Donohue. He writes that prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. I'm going to read that again. prayer is the voice of longing

it reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging so I've seen many times much as Ram Dass describes it that when all else fails when we can't pull any of the tricks out of our bag all that's left is that pain and that longing

You know, it's something in us wants to find a way to reconnect, to feel refuge. I talk about this a lot in my book True Refuge, just deep, deep longing to feel that sense of belonging. And I found that when somebody comes to me and they're in that place of completely stuck, like absolutely can't find my way out, if I even ask about prayer, there may be like a sense of, but I don't know much about that, but there's something that lights up because all of us deep down know that we do have something, some yearning in us and hey, maybe if we really just go to the power of our prayer, something can be possible. It gives hope. We sense when we're, that there is something essentially pure and truthful

and honest in our prayer. It's clean. This is Clarissa Estes, and she's the one that wrote Women Who Rown with the Wals, and I think this is so powerful. She says, you may be pushed down, you may be kept from rising,

but no one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven. You may be pushed down, you may be kept from rising, but no one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven. happen. So this is where everything, the bottom falls out, something in us can reach towards what we're yearning for. I was struck a story of one friend told he's a doctor in this area who was really appalled at the coldness in the medical system. So he started bringing mindfulness into his relationships both working on himself and also just bringing that quality.

of presence and attentiveness and interest in care more consciously and helping to bring some trainings to some other doctors in mindfulness. And he describes one time being with a woman with terminal cancer and she was at the end of her life and really caught in the fear and the grief of it and he was sitting there talking to her and he said, would you like to pray together? And she was like really surprised because no doctor had ever asked her that and she said, I would love to pray with you together right now. And that's what they did.

They prayed together and there was a sense of intimacy in that and for her that was the one way of really sensing that that spirit or that field of love that was able to hold what was going on for her. So what is prayer? Okay, let's just get our, on the same page with our definitions. I think of prayer as a way of communing with a larger belonging. There's something larger, we intuit it. And when we're caught in the smallness of our egoic self,

we can begin to communicate with that something larger. And sometimes it's in the form of gratitude and thanks, and sometimes it's in the form of oh please please this expression of what we're longing for so what are we praying to really and if I could we could do a survey and it'd be very interesting to say well what do you really sense you're praying to some of you might remember how the Unitarians put it they address their prayers to whom it may concern They also say that Moses received the ten suggestions, which I have always liked. So sometimes our prayers directed really specifically.

Some of you might remember the three-year-old who would pray saying, Our father, who does art in heaven, Harold is his name. Harold. So we pray to Harold. But many sense, this is just a large, larger presence and sometimes we have names on it whether the presence is conceived as being Jesus or Buddha or the Bodhisattva Kwanian or the fine mother or Allah or guru. I mean it's just it could be anything that's a larger sense of being great spirit.

Sometimes it's just a sense we're calling on the universe, the everything, reality. I saw this cartoon, two insects are talking. I don't know why everyone calls me a praying mantis. Actually, I'm agnostic. So we pray and it doesn't have to do with any religion. This is very universal, the sense of this longing and something in us that's saying, please help. There's a shadow side to prayer because where we're going with this class is how do we develop prayer as a practice? because like everything else, when you practice it, it gains power, real power. And there's a shadow side to be able to be aware of so we don't get hooked on that.

And the shadow side, you know, Joseph Campbell put it beautifully of describing how religion can be the opiate of the masses so it can cover over the mystery. And this happens with immature prayer. You know, when our prayer is commandeered by fear or by grasping. Now, sometimes immature prayer is just simply developmentally that we're just young and, you know, in some way asking for something. That's the kind of early phases of prayer. Like the little girl who's eight years old and she's always praying, every time she loses

the tooth, she's praying to the tooth fairy for more interesting gifts under the pillow. Finally, she gets really curious about the tooth fairy, and she asks her mom, are you the tooth fairy? And her mom, should she really tell her? And she finally says, yeah, I am. And the little girl appears to take this news pretty well and to stride. She heads towards the door, but then she turns back with a quizzical look and she says, how do you get into the other kids' houses? So developmentally, early on, we can have some ideas of what's out there and do our

requests, but often it gets taken over by fear and craving. Prayer can be really mechanical. They can be a mechanical recitation and many of you have experienced that and that's what turns us off to prayer. Zen Master Ticknaud Han, instead of calling prayers prostrations where you pray and put your head down, he describes it as touching the earth. earth so that we really take it out of this mechanical habitual behavior and infuse it with a living presence.

But it can be very mechanical. It can be a habitual reflex whenever we're in pain or discomfort, this habit of prayer to wish it away, a way of getting away from what's here. Another story with a child because those are the best ones for this kind of theme. the normal group is coming to Thanksgiving dinner and the mother's speeding around, she invited not just the relatives, but the relatives' relatives, that kind of thing. She's kind of going nuts with all the stress of it, really wanting it to go well. So finally the guests are all there, everybody's come around the table and she turns to

her six-year-old and says, honey, why don't you offer the blessing, say the prayer for Thanksgiving? And little girl said, I wouldn't know what to say, mommy. And the mother says, just say what you hear. mommy saying? You already get the setup. The daughter bows her head and says, Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner? The kind of prayer that often is most harmful, the shadow side of prayer is when there's kind of a self-demeaning quality, I'm so bad. You know, Lord, I'm so bad, I'll never do that again. Please don't punish me.

And often when we're in the shadow side of prayer, there's no listening. You know, Mother Teresa said that all prayer begins with listening. There's no listening, there's no presence. It's basically our wanting, fearing, limbic system just playing itself out. That's the immature or shadow side. So then what is it really mean to have a prayerful presence, a mindful prayer? And first I'll just describe a little of what makes prayer powerful. Because there's this real transformational dynamic in prayer. When we're suffering, we're living in a contracted reality. We're believing the stories of something's wrong with me, I'm a small, deficient self

and I'm separate from others. We're living in that. There's some wisdom in us that knows that and has a longing to belong to or experience something larger. There's some wisdom in us that knows that and that has us reach out. It's almost like we're caught in a cocoon and saying, open up, step out. It's having us reach out and as Clarissa says, lift our heart towards heaven towards this larger belonging. The poet Rumi puts it this way. In times of sudden danger, most people call out, oh my God. Now why would they keep doing? this if it didn't help. Only a fool keeps going back where nothing happens. The whole world

lives within a safeguarding. Fish inside waves, birds held in the sky, the elephant, the wolf, the lion as he hunts, the dragon, the ant, the waiting snake, even the ground, the air, the water. Every spark floating up from the fire all exist are held in the divine, Nothing is ever alone for a single moment. All giving comes from there. No matter who you think you put your open hand out toward, it's that which gives. So communing actually connects us.

It enlarges us. It helps us waken from the egoic self to a larger, more integrated being. Some of you may have had the experience, of talking to someone who's passed away. And when you start talking to that person, something happens. Do you know what I mean by that? There's something that it wakes up, some connection that we don't really have words for.

It's mysterious. It's like you could say, well, if you think of somebody that's alive and you begin to talk to them, even though they're not here, you know they're alive and of course there's economic. Of course there's that connection, but the same thing happens if they've passed away. When we start communicating, there's a communing that happens, a connecting that happens. No matter who you think you put your open hand out towards, it's that which gives. My own experience with prayer started when I'd go to the early retreats that I went to in Buddhism was probably now 30 some years ago or whatever and we'd be practicing the loving-kindness practice

which has a kind of prayer to it or taking refuges and so on but I'd find it felt more of the kind of repetitive but didn't it didn't have juice to it so I began to experiment for myself you know like well what really makes prayer powerful and I found that when I was in some way suffering, whether I was feeling fear or grief or feeling hurt, there was this longing in me to feel very close in a loving presence that very much loved this being right here. That was the longing. So I would begin my prayer by really waking up my sense modality so it wasn't like a a, just going through a routine, but I would actually speak to that presence that I wanted

to feel. I might say, you know, just the words, beloved, please be with me, or please love me, or I might say something like, please, I'm feeling disconnected, bring me back, bring me home. And I found that just by starting to speak, something is a thing. and me would soften and become more porous and more available to presence just by speaking those words. But I also found that if I visualized and sensed kind of a field of presence around me, it actually became stronger, like if I imagined into it.

And then I started discovering that if I sometimes at the beginning or sometimes at the end of a meditation really bowed my head. that in the bowing there was some sense of this amazing tenderness of belonging to something larger, kind of humility and belonging that was completely sweet and tender. More recently, I ran into this by John O'Donohue who says it a lot better than I can. He calls prayer the bridge between longing and belonging. One of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the divine, a stillness deepens.

The blaring din of distraction seizes, and the deeper tranquility within the heart envelopes the body. To see people at prayer is a touching sight. For a while, they have become unmoored from the grip of society, work, role. It is if they've chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul. They rest in that inner temple impervious to outer control or claiming. The human body gathered in prayer mirrors our fragility and it makes a statement of recognition of the divine generosity that's always blessing us.

So to empower prayer, there's three sense modalities that are really helpful. to speak, that's the auditory, to visualize, and to feel in some way with your posture that there's an opening and a receptivity. For me, I kept over the years and it's been many years now over and over again in training myself and by that I mean really going through the experience and developing that pathway so much that it increasingly I'd have the sense that that I could just say the words, Beloved, please,

and just kind of not even move, but imagine myself bowing and feel a sense of love embracing me. And the words from the teacher Pungaji really started resonating that love is always loving you. That it just takes a tiny fraction of a moment of remembering to reach out. and we sense, oh, love is loving us.

Now, here's the actual raw material of a training for those of you that want to develop the pathway. And there are three phases to any prayer that really brings alive a full presence. And we come again back to, it kind of comes out of John O'Donohue, use words prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. I like the image of a great tree and I imagine the roots are going inward. It's like

that's the part of it that's going inward to touch into the longing and the branches are going outward to reach to the universe to wholeness to our belonging and then in that openness there's this receptivity. And those are the three phases. The first phase, when you're stuck, let's say you want to pray when you're stuck, the first phase is to go inward and sense in that stuckness, what am I really wanting? What deeply am I wanting? What do I really care about? To feel it in your body, feel it like right inside the fear, what's the yearning, right inside the grief, what's the yearning. So the first part is to contact inward that.

That's the roots going in. The second part is to communicate that, please, please love me. Please, may I feel my belonging? And the third part is to listen, to just be receptive. The poet Rumi again, he says, cry out. Don't be stolid and silent with your pain. lament and let the milk of loving flow into you. So it requires this real mindful presence,

each step of the way to really tap in and listen to what do we really long for, and then to reach out and call for help and then to be receptive. One man who was really living with a huge amount of shame about his alcoholism, about the way it affected his family and really created distance for everybody in his family was practicing with this. Getting into the roots was really to let himself feel the shame and the sense of his own badness. And when I asked him, so what is your prayer? And he says, it's like I want to take the badness and I want to offer it into this universe and say, please hold all of me in your heart.

That was the prayers. Because every one of us has places in us that feel bad or wrong or not okay. It's that yearning like, let this be okay. Let it be held in some really merciful large presence. So that was his. Then he would do that and he actually, you know, which is a really beautiful gesture handing it over. And many, many rounds, it's like lifting your heart to have.

lifting her heart again and again, many rounds and he was able to feel that sense of the heart of the world including him. There are so many different pathways that we lift our heart to heaven. The trick is to practice and when there's even a little bit of that sense of tenderness, because it creates a kind of moistness in the heart. to entrain to that, to spend 10, 20, 30 seconds and get to know it because you become more and more familiar with the awake heart and that feels more like home.

Now, people will also, especially those that have had a background in Buddhism, will often say, But Tara, this sounds awfully like, you know, there's some other out there and a self here. It's very dualistic. Here you're going to hand the badness over to a, other out there, you're asking this other, oh please love little me. And what I often respond is that the given is that we spend many, many moments living in a kind of separate self sense.

And this is actually a bridge to discovering belonging that starts where we are and takes that sense of really wanting to be held in something larger. And by going right into the very essence of that longing, with full presence, it becomes a bridge where we actually dissolve into that larger sense of being. So most people find that even though they'll say, well, meta, who's asking prayers for who? We find that just by going through the motions, the separate selfness dissolves. try it out it's really

it's one of those skillful means that moves from duality to something unitive the poet Rolka says I yearn to belong to something to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing I yearn to be held in the great hands

of your heart Oh, let them take me now into them. I place these fragments my life. And you, God, spend them however you want. So we begin to explore this, this giving ourselves over. Now, as I mentioned, there's many, many pathways of prayer. I'll share one woman's, which I love her, the way that she practiced this African-American woman that was coming to a month-long retreat with me

and she was struggling with unworthiness, anxiety, unlovable, the same things that pretty much everybody struggles with when they start paying attention and trying to practice self-compassion but got really stuck. Really working on it but stuck. So we met again a few days later and she came in glowing. So I said, okay, so what gives? tell me about your practice. And here's what she said.

She said, well, I went to church to pray this morning. No, wait a minute. Right there, I'm thinking, no, wait a second. Here we are in this rural New England campus of a retreat center. And it's not quite the protocol to take off and go to church. But I didn't, you know, I'm whatever works kind of person. I'm real pragmatic. So I said, okay.

So she goes on, yeah. So we were all singing gospel, dancing the spirit of Jesus. I was crying, I was praying, I was loving Jesus, and I just prayed for Jesus to be with me over and over, to be with the hurting me, the unworthy me, the scared me. I just prayed over and over. And here I am, and Jesus, and she was wearing this beautiful shawl, she was my shawl. So by the way, that around then I started catching on that she hadn't like literally left campus. You know, she had gone to church in her meditation. And it was so beautiful because she said, you know, these last few days, I just, well, whenever

I'm feeling caught, I'll just say, please be with me and I'll feel the shawl is just alive with Jesus. And when I'm walking through the woods, I'm feeling held in the spirit of Jesus. And when I'm taking the shower, even though I don't have my shawl on, you know, she went on and on. And so I said, well, what's it like right now? Because I often do that. You know, when somebody is touching something that's working, I'll say, okay, right now, What's that like? And so we sat together and she said, well, like I'm bathed in light and I'm bathed in love. I said, okay, get to know that, memorize it.

Feel where it is in your body, feel how it makes your heart feel, just memorize it. And should we spend some time? I said, just keep on whenever you just feel that sense it makes around and bathe, just just pause and savor that. She said, Tara, this is practice? Yeah. So that shawl was helping her to meditate. What she had done, again, remember the tree.

She went the roots deep. She was feeling the pain and she was crying out from that pain. Be with me, be with all of me, be with the hurt, be with the fear. And then just wide open and then feeling herself bathed. it starts out when we pray and we feel that melting and openness kind of a state that's like, oh, this is great. And then of course it goes away. I mean I have so many times felt kind of dissolved into the light and the love and then gone to my desk and gotten an email and been very, very small and irritable in moments. So we can reconstruct ourselves quickly. But the more it's like water going

through a stream and just flushing through and flushing through to all the mud just flushed out and the more we pour through our being a kind of prayerfulness, the more it goes from state to trait. We actually become very familiar with that state of belonging. It's like the poet hafeitha said, ask the friend for love. Ask him again. for I have learned that every heart will get what a praise foremost. For this woman that was at retreat, she described how she would be meditating and feel the shawl, and then the shawl was like as vast as the world,

and she said, anybody that came to mind, she can include in her prayer. Because her shawl, that Jesus shawl held everybody. And that's what happens when prayer becomes powerful, is that we widen the circles and our prayer might originally start with oh help me I'm feeling unworthy or bad or stuck or hurting and as we start dissolving

and feeling belonging then we start including others you know one friend's mother would spend an hour every day and she would include everybody in her circle you know hundreds of blessings to people that she can cared about. And she had the most peaceful dying. That's what her daughter described,

because she was so living in connection with all being, so connected that there's no loneliness when our hearts are open like that. Prayerfulness also naturally leads to compassion and action. We feel connected to others so we actually want to act on behalf of them. Gandhi would describe how he took off a day each week, a day each week, so he could put the roots in deep and feel the prayer so that his actions would then come from the most pure and sincere part of his being. Prayerfulness leads to wise action. So what I'd like to do is because I've talked enough about it, is just let's dip in a little together. We'll close the evening I invite you to do a little reflection on your own.

So let this be a pause where you can begin like that tree just to put your roots into your own being or you enter your body, let the awareness come down and into the body. So you can feel yourself sitting here breathing, feel your humanness, your heart, scanning your life.

You might spring in the inquiry. Is there anything right now between me and happiness or between me and feeling at peace at home with myself. Is there anything right now causing suffering? I might find that there's maybe a conflict with someone or something to do with your health, something you're afraid about, some way that you're feeling down on yourself. This is the listening. This is when we're letting the roots go inward.

Sense in the state of our hearts. sense where there may be something where you're not at home with yourself and let those roots go down so that you're listening inwardly, letting yourself contact the sense of something not feeling okay, sensing a her to the fear, the anger, the upset. You might even ask yourself, what's the worst part of this? You know, what am I most afraid of or most upset about? letting yourself contact, what feels difficult, where you're most vulnerable.

Often it's the pain of separation in some way, feeling not okay, cut off, bad about yourself, not safe, contacting the roots like that. And then to begin to experiment, what is it that you really want, long for? If you could mentally whisper and really hear the whisper, or you can even whisper out loud very softly, what is it that you're yearning for? Is it please may I feel safe or please may I feel loved? Please help me come home again and it helps you just slightly bow your head if you are comfortable and want to bring your palms together that's fine.

This is something you can do on your own also. just experimenting. What's it like if you bow your head and whisper and call on something larger? You could sense it as a larger part of your own being, your own awake heart. For you it might be God or Jesus or the Buddha or the universe or great spirit. But calling on some larger presence, please help. help. And as you do, feel your sincerity because the power of your prayer arises from your sincerity. Please help. Please love me. Let it come from an innocence and then just listen,

just receive. Notice what happens. You can experiment. It's not just once saying something. You can ask again, you can whisper it again and again until you feel. that you've arrived in your sincerity. You've gone beyond the mechanical, you're embodying, your longing. Let there be a porousness to the heart so the love that's here can flow in. So that maybe you can begin to taste that sense that love is always loving us. Ask the friend for love. Ask them again. For I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most.

most, widen your attention and sense the presence of others praying and that sense of a shared heart, whether it's right here in this room or all those that are participating with us in some way around the world, that we bring our prayers together, we sense that continuous heart space that really is as vast as the world. We close together in a simple way with our prayer for all beings. May all beings everywhere be filled with love and kindness, held in loving kindness. No love and kindness as their deepest essence. And all beings everywhere realize their connectedness.

May all beings everywhere live from love. dedicated to justice, to peace, to the will-being of all beings. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.