Tara Brach - Radical Acceptance - Our Gateway to Love and Freedom

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Radical Acceptance - Our Gateway to Love and Freedom - Our capacity to realize the truth of who we are and to love fully, arises from moments of true acceptance. This means meeting our unfolding life with an unconditional, open and tender presence. This talk on Radical Acceptance explores how the trance of unworthiness contracts us away from presence, and how activating mindfulness and self-compassion with RAIN loosens the grip of self-aversion and awakens our hearts.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends and welcome. I wanted to share with you that next year is the 20th anniversary of my first book, Radical Acceptance, and we're offering a new addition that will include a new chapter and also introduce the rain practice. So I'm in the thick of working on this and I continue to be moved in my own practice and by working with others, moved by how essential the practice of radical acceptance is, how in any moment that we truly aren't resisting, that we're truly opening to the life of the moment, we have the capacity to love more fully and to realize that this mystery, this vastness, that's really what we are.

So, in honor of the power of radical acceptance, I thought I'd offer a talk revisiting these teachings, and I know for many of you this, it will feel familiar and I hope for all of you, it will be the kind of reminders that bring more of that vivid wakefulness and openness and kindness to your moments in your life. Okay, I hope you enjoy. Namaste, greetings friends. A good number of years ago now, the Dalai Lama was interviewed by Network News and the inquiry was really about happiness because that was the subject of his latest book.

And they asked him a question which was, what was your happiest moment in memory? And his response, he first gave that kind of now classic mischievous look and his response was, I think now. And I've always loved that story because, you know, for many listening, being present, here and now is not a new idea. And yet, as we know, often it's mostly an idea. You know, we're usually on our way somewhere. We're usually checking things off the list. So often we're lost in thought and thinking that the important moment of our life, we're on our way to it or it's already in the past. But it's rare that we sense, well, right now, this moment really matters.

The gift of meditation, of training in presence, is that it really allows our body and mind to be in the same place at the same time. It allows us to arrive in the one place where love and happiness and creativity and healing, freedom, all is possible. So our inquiry really is what takes us from presence. And if we, begin to look, we're in a trance of thinking most of the time and that trance is typically driven by wants and fears, by the sense that something's missing right now or something's wrong. And even under that, it's often, and this is usually our core focus, that something's wrong with me, with how I am, with what I'm doing, that sense of never enough, that I'm

some way deficient or flawed and that failures around the corner. And the expression of that is a background sense of fear or anxiety and uncomfortableness and sometimes shame. So this will be our subject for this talk which is how do we wake up out of this trance of feeling like there's something wrong with us? how do we disentangle from the self-judgments and live our lives? And one of the stories I'll always remember, a woman described being with her mom when her mom was dying and she was in a coma and at one moment her mother kind of woke up from

the coma and was very lucid and looked her in the eyes and said, you know, all my life, I thought something was wrong with me. And those were her last words. and for this woman in a sense it was a kind of a gift because it made so clear how we can go through decades how many moments we miss of living, of loving, of enjoying beauty when we're all wrapped up in thinking that we need to be different, that we're falling short in some way. and this is what drew me to write my first book Radical Acceptance that as a response to that sense of being flawed,

being caught in what I call the trance of unworthiness. I remember after writing the book I was on book tour and one stop I was giving a workshop on this and there was a big poster of me and the caption at the bottom was something is wrong with me. It was a great welcome to a new community there. And yet, you know, for those of you listening, if you start looking at your life, most of, you know, I mean, huge amount of self-judgment. And what we don't always realize, and this is why I call it a

trance, is how much that underlying sense of not enough affects our moment. affects how generative and creative we are at work, affects our relationships, how intimate we can be, because it's very hard to be close to others if we feel something's wrong with us. It affects everything. And the Buddha said that the great suffering we experience is not realizing the truth of who we are, our true nature, and being caught up in an identification with, a small, limited self. And there's a story I've always loved that I think describes us so beautifully, true story that there was an enormous clay statue of the Buddha in Thailand

and it wasn't beautiful but it was loved and revered by the populations that had survived over centuries of storms and battles and so on. And in the 50s there was a long, dry season And during that time, there were some cracks appeared. So an enterprising monk shined a flashlight into the crack and what came back was the gleam of gold and shined into another crack and another. And they took off what turned out to be just a covering of plaster and clay and found the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in that part of Asia. and what's interesting is the monks say that the statue was covered to protect it during tumultuous times and it's much in the same way that we protect our innate goodness and purity.

We cover it over when we feel threatened to be able to navigate our world. And the suffering is when we cover over with our defenses and our aggressions and so on, is that we get identified with the covering. We think we're the covering, that controlling, promoting self, and we forget who's looking through. We forget the tender, awake heart, the awareness that's looking through. You know, the essence of all sickness is homesickness. There's a suffering when we forget the gold, when we leave home. We forget what we really belong to, that aliveness and awareness and loving. We forget who we are.

A story from my son's youth in a school he went to in the art classes, the children would sit forward to a table. A teacher would circulate as they did their artwork. And one time teacher saw a little girl being very very much. very industrious with her drawing and stood behind her for a while and then she asked her, you know, hon, what are you drawing? And the little girl responded, I'm drawing God. And the teacher's kind of chuckled and said, well, you know, no one knows what God looks like. And without skipping a beat, without even looking up, the little girl said, they will in a moment.

And so, you know, it becomes such a profound inquiry. You know, what leads us to forgetting who we are, to judging ourselves so harshly to becoming so identify with the coverings? And really we can look first to main culprit, the messaging of our culture. Our culture tells us what it means to be a respectable person, a successful person, a likable person. There's an essay I love, a short essay that illustrates this and it goes like this. It says, if you can start the day without caffeine or pills, if you're cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can understand when

loved ones are too busy to give you time, if you can overlook when people take things out on you when through no fault of yours, something goes wrong. If you can take criticism and blame without resentment, if you can face the world without lies or deceit, if you can conquer tension without medical help, if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you are probably a dog. We value ourselves according to society's standards of success, how we should appear, how we should look, the size of our body, the kind of intelligence. I often think of children in school and the message they get that really only left brain intelligence counts and how many come out thinking that they're

stupid, that in some way they're inferior. That really pains me. You know, our culture's message of not enough and of badness is particularly toxic for non-dominant population. because the messages from the dominant culture are internalized. We think we have our own views, but we're not thinking our own thoughts. We're thinking society's thoughts. And consider in the United States for hundreds of years and continues to this day that people of color are given the message of inferior. You're inferior.

And goes through all the institutions, housing, education, justice, finance, medical, your life's not as valuable as the message. It's a deep conditioning, this trance of unworthiness. And then the children, of course, anticipate and assume they'll fail. Tony Morrison writes that in this country, American means being white, everyone else has to hyphenate. So, we're talking about really how do we land up in the trance of unworthiness and the messages of the culture are really strong to women, those with disability, those different from cultural ideal in terms of their body, non-dominant sexual orientation, gender identity, given the messages. The primary funnel for our messages that trap us in the trans of unworthiness

is through family and caregivers. Of course, this is the domain of most of the main of most of the messages. psychotherapy and it's a primary channel for the culture of insecurity and fear of failure. I mean, if you could ask what a child most wants, what a child, a young child most wants and needs, it's to be understood and loved. Yet, out of their own insecurities and fears, most parents don't know how to see clearly and mirror back who this child is. Most parents aren't equipped to love unconditionally. So, for so many, there's an experience of severed belonging,

cut off from the most significant other, and really severed belonging from the not okay parts of ourselves. I mean, the core wound, I'm not lovable, I'm not loved, I'm not worthy. Okay, this is the trance of unworthiness. and then to manage it, we take on these strategies of striving and accomplishing and trying to prove ourselves that endless self-improvement project. This is Jimmy Hooker on nutrition and health. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits are Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks. The Italians drink huge amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks. The Germans drink a lot of beers and goes on and on. The conclusion, eat and drink what you like, it's speaking English that kills you. We strive. We constantly are trying to improve and dial it in to be good, get it right. also are another strategy for managing the trance of unworthiness is getting addicted to substances that numb us, that take us away from the rawness and the pain. But the biggest strategy

is that we try to judge ourselves into being a better person. We try to fix ourselves through judgment. The inner critic is trying to help us become a better person. But of course we know the amount of pain that that can cause. All of this fuels the coverings on the Golden Buddha. I mean, no amount of accomplishing. No amount of judging actually helps us to contact, experience, and trust our goodness. I mean, check it out. Ask yourself, what would be enough to really be okay? What would be enough? The healing, the path to realizing who we are and living from that freedom in terms of the trainings of meditation is learning to bring radical acceptance an unconditional, compassionate presence to the experience of the

moment. This is what helps to dissolve the coverings, to make the coverings transparent so our light, our creativity, our love, our intelligence can shine through. Radical acceptance, really opening to the present moment. But I want to note here the objection. Most people have a fear of accepting how we are in the moment, our fears, our shame. And the fears, I'll never change. I'll never get better. And yet, as American psychologist Carl Rogers put it,

it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was, that I was free to change. In other words, the prerequisite for true transformation and healing is this radical acceptance, this presence and kindness with what's right here. Okay, so the rest of this exploration is how do we do that? And what I'd like to do here is introduce a practice, a meditation that weaves together mindfulness, a mindful presence, with self-concumption. compassion, they can really free our hearts, that can wake us up from the coverings and allow us to rest and express the gold of who we are. And the meditation is called the rain meditation. I know many

are familiar with it. Reigns an acronym for Recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. Recognize meaning see what's here. Okay, fear. Just name it. it. Allow, allow it to be here, not to fight it, not to judge it, just let be. Investigate. That doesn't mean cognitively investigate. That can be a trap. It means investigate by deepening the inquiry into the body and feeling what's here, contacting it. And then nurture, the last part of rain, is to bring kindness to what we find. When we do that, we accept. We experience. what's called after the rain, which means we start opening to our natural being, to the gold that's here, to the awareness and love that was here but covered over. The first two steps

of rain recognize and allow, all on their own, are very powerful. One man I was meeting with was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer's and he was a meditator and he was a psychologist and he knew what was going on and he described to me an experience he had at the onset. He had been invited to give a talk, 100 people or so and when he arrived and he was about to begin and he went completely blank. I mean he had no idea why they were here or what he was supposed to say. So here's what he did. first he did nothing, he just paused. And then he started naming what he was aware of. He named, you know, fear, and then he bowed.

Then he'd named, confused, and he'd bow. Then he'd say, heart pounding, bow. This went on and he started saying breathing, bow, relaxing. He looked around and he apologized and I'm sorry. and one of the people in the group said, you know, no one has ever given us the teachings like this. And they had tears in their eyes. And what had he done? Well, first, he didn't do anything. He did what I call the sacred art of pausing. He just stopped. It says, Victor Frankel puts it,

he says, between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And in that space is our power and our freedom. He just stopped. And then he began those first two steps of rain, which are really an expression of mindfulness, where he just named what was going on and he bowed, he allowed it to be there. Very, very powerful, very powerful way of coming home again. Now here's the thing. If it's a major tangle, major emotional tangle, then we need to add the last two steps of rain. Rain allows us to change very deep-rooted patterning. During the pandemic, I had countless emails, people saying, rain saved my life.

And I really understood what they meant. It's had such an impact on me. I remember when my mother first moved down to live with my husband and me, and she was 82. And she had a lot that she needed from me, a lot of doctors' appointments, and mostly just needed me to keep her company some. And at the same time, I had a whole lot going on on the work and teaching front, and I started feeling increasingly stressed. And I remember one day being at the computer and I was writing a talk, it was on loving kindness. She walked into my office to show me

an article and I barely looked up from the screen. And so she very graciously put it down and left and as I kind of looked up to see her retreating form, I had this thought, I don't know how long I'll have her. So I decided to do the practice of rain and got quiet and the R recognized was a feeling a sense of guilt and anxiety. I'm just not just not coming through. And the A allow, I just let that be there rather than adding more judgment to it. And the allow has this sense of, this belongs, just like the waves in the ocean, this belongs. So it's really letting it be. And that allowed me to deepen my attention and begin to investigate. and I started feeling the feelings in my body, the tightness, and I asked myself, what am I believing?

And the belief was, I'm failing. I'm failing my mother and I'm also going to fall short teaching. The feelings in my body were a real squeeze in my heart and this sense of pressure and tightness. And as I opened to it, I asked the question that really deepened. investigation, which is, what do I need? What is this vulnerable place need? This place of feeling squeezed and guilty and fearful. And what I got was I just need to trust. I need to trust my love. I need to trust my goodness, my heart, you know. And so I put my hand on my heart and this is a part of nurturing. It often makes it even more powerful. And I just gave myself. that message, you know, trust your heart, trust your goodness, it's okay. And as I did that,

I just felt more space, felt more space, more openness. And so I stayed for a few moments and rested in a more spacious, more tender awareness that's after the rain, you know, there was a shift. I went from being this, you know, guilty, anxious person to this space of compassion, of kindness. And what I noticed in the days and weeks to come, and I repeated rain, I did what I call a light rain, just I repeated it and it was shorter and very effective because I noticed when I was with my mom, I was able to be really present. I was able to really be with her and enjoy our big salads for dinner and our walks by the river. And when she died, it was a few years later, three or four years later.

Deep grief, of course, I adored her. But no regrets. And I realized that rain saved my life moments with my mom. When I did the rain practice, I put my hand on my heart, I gave myself a message and that's often a beautiful way of self-compassion to give ourselves a message that will bring some comfort and healing. But sometimes we can't. And I want to name here that self-compassion doesn't mean that we're offering ourselves compassion, that a self-compassion. You can draw on a larger source. I worked with an vet who came back after being in Iraq. And when we explored what would help him nurture a very, very traumatized place in him, it was the love of Jesus.

A man described being with the Dalai Lama and telling the Dalai Lama about his fears and the Dalai Lama said, you know, just let yourself be held in the heart of the Buddha. and a physicist I was reading talks about touching a tree and feeling the nurturing there, the connection. You can call on a friend, you can call on a deity, you can call on your ancestors. I sometimes call on formless loving awareness, some larger source. What rain does when we offer ourselves attention and when we bring in that nurturing is a kind of spiritual reparenting. We're bringing the presence and kindness we need to heal. And if you're more, you know, science-oriented, you might think of it that we're actually

rewiring the brain with rain because it creates new neuronal pathways to feeling empowered, creative, loving, lucid. Okay, friends, let's do a brief practice. We'll do what I call a light rain, to give you a taste of it. And wherever you are, you might adjust how you're sitting so that you can just know you're feeling comfortable, at ease, awake. You might take a few full breaths, letting your eyes close or your gaze be downcast. And you might bring to mind a situation in your life that feels difficult where you turn on yourself and some way. It might be in a relationship, might be at work, might be related to an addiction, to a health challenge, but somewhere, some situation where you land up feeling judgmental

and down on yourself. Let yourself go to the most triggering moment of that. And we begin a light rain by recognizing what's going on. And you'll be a light rain. And you're might just mentally whisper the word that most captures what's going on. It might be judgment, shame, embarrassment, fear, anxiety, anger, and then allow it. And that means in some way you're saying this belongs, this is part of the experience of the moment, letting it be, and beginning to investigate it. You know, what am I believing when this is going on? Am I believing that I'm failing, that I'm flawed, that I'm creating pain for myself or for another. And with whatever I'm believing, what's the strongest feeling in the body going on?

You might feel your throat, your chest, your belly, and just sense where you feel vulnerability, where you feel tightness or activation. And you might even let your face and your posture express what you're feeling. it's a powerful way to get more somatically connected. We continue to investigate and feel right into the center of the vulnerability and ask yourself, what do I need? How does this part want me to be with it? And explore nurturing.

You might put your hand on your heart, especially if you've never done it, vary the touch so it expresses kindness. And just send some message inward that you think might be healing. could be, I care about this suffering. Or trust your heart, trust your goodness. Or I'm here and I'm not leaving. Or it's okay, you're enough. Whatever you sense will bring some healing

and you can have it come from an outside source. A friend, a grandparent, your dog, the trees, a deity, formless, loving awareness. Let that energy of kindness move through your hand right into your heart to wherever you feel vulnerable. And then let go of all doings and sense the presence it's here. Sense the shift from a flawed self to the awakeness, the awareness, the tenderness, noticing the gold, noticing this tender presence that's more the truth of who you are than any limiting story or belief. The more you trust this, the more freedom, creativity, love, aliveness you'll find in your life. And take a few full breaths. If your eyes are closed,

opening your eyes and the last part, I'm focusing on inner healing and as we hold our own being with radical acceptance as we practice rain and come home into who we are, that loving presence naturally extends to others. We're able to see their vulnerability and see their gold. And I've work with so many parents, been reactive with their children and done a kind of inner rain process and much more able to see and respond to their children's unmet needs, less judgmental. And I've worked with so many people who are in conflict with partners, other people in their life, and that inner work enables us to put down blame and really communicate in a much more intelligent, open-hearted way. And it takes practice. We go into trance. We disconnect from our own loving,

a wake heart and gold. And then we're really looking through the filters of our culture, our society. We don't see others. We see their coverings. If we're in our ego, identify with our ego, that's what we see in others. So I'll share a final story that's been a real guide for me on the path. And this story is told by a minister describing a family holiday trip and stopping at a restaurant that's nearly empty. And she says she sat her son, Eric, her one-year-old, in a high chair, and suddenly she hears him squeal with glee. Hi there, two words he thinks are one. Hi there. His face is alive with excitement. Then she says, I saw the source of his merriment, and my eyes could not take it in all at once. A tattered rag of a coat, baggy pants,

gums as bare as Eric's hair, uncombed, unwashed. His hands were flapping in the the air, round loose wrists. Hi there, baby, hi there, big boy. I see you buster. My husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross between what do we do and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, hi there. Every call was echoed. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. I shoved a cracker at Eric and he pulverized it in the tray. I whispered, why me? Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting, do you know Patty Cake? Adaboy, you know peekaboo? Hey look, he knows peekaboo. We ate in silence except Eric who is running through his repertoire for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. We had enough. Dennis went to pay the check

imploring me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trundled Eric out of the high chair and looked toward the exit. The old man sat poised and waiting his chair directly between me and the door. Lord just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Eric. I headed toward the door. It soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans. As I drew closer to the man, Eric had his eyes riveted to his best friend, leaned far over my arm, reaching with both arms and a baby, pick me up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye to eye with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms. spread wide. The bum's eyes both asked and implored,

Would you let me hold your baby? There was no need for me to answer since Eric propelled himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly, a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder, the man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor gently, so gently, cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Eric in his arms for a moment and then his eyes open and set squarely on mine. He said in a firm, commanding voice, you take care of this baby. Somehow I managed, I will, from a throat that contained a stone.

He pried Eric from his chest, unwillingly, longingly, as though he was in pain. I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me. God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift. I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms, I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me. I've shared this story many times and each time it feels like a wake-up. You know, we think society's thoughts, we forget to look past the coverings towards the human heart. And in our current world, friends, where there's so much dividedness and trauma, seeing others

as different, as bad, as inferior, create such violence around the world. Create such violence. There's so much trance. One of the great gifts we bring to the world is the dedication to see the gold in ourselves and in each other. And that's the meaning of namaste. I see the sacred in you. It allows us to be part of the healing. It allows us to bridge divides and bring forward the goodness, the potential.

You know, this capacity to see gold is the blessing of radical acceptance. of learning to meet our moments with open-hearted presence. It lets us truly live from love. I'd like to close with a short prayer. This is written by the poet Diane Ackerman. You might sit back and close your eyes and just take it in. In the name of daybreak and the eyelids of morning and the wayfaring moon and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor my soul, soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life wherever and in whatever form it may dwell. On earth my home and in the manor. of the stars. Thank you for your attention friends. Blessings.