Tara Brach - Radical Love 2: Loving Ourselves into Healing (2020-08-19)

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Radical Love 2: Loving Ourselves into Healing(2020-08-19) - Radical love sees and cherishes the sacred that lives through all beings.  In this talk, we'll look at the barrier to loving the life that is right here—what we call self—and how we can call on the light and warmth of awareness to awaken that love.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. It feels really lovely to begin with that namaste. As many of you know, namaste means I see the divine in you and in me and in all beings. and what an amazing way to encounter ourselves in the world. You probably know that in the West, instead of Namaste, the handshake, that open hand is showing that you're not carrying a gun.

It's such a big difference. And so this is one cultural appropriation that our world desperately needs. It's one of a sincere namaste. This is part two of a series of talks. I'm not sure how many on radical love. And I think of radical love is a love that sees and cherishes the sacred in each life, the way the sacred lives through us. And I thought maybe I'd start with the perspective of young humans.

These are some comments on love by little people, age 5 through 9, Glenn, age 7, says if falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don't want to do it, it takes too long. Manual, age 8, I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn't supposed to be so painful. Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. That's Greg age 8. I'm in favor of love as long as it doesn't happen when dinosaurs is on television. That's gel age six. Love is foolish, but I still might try it sometime. That's Floyd, age nine.

One more. Two people promised to go through sickness and illness and disease together. That's Marlon age 10. So you can see a little bit the imprint of our culture on our sense of what love is, and well, probably stage of development too. Radical love is fully evolved. love. And the first talk that I gave on this really reflect on a radical love as the expression of true spiritual awakening and also as the grounds of meaningful social transformation. Many know

it's the heart of the civil rights movement of Black Lives Matters. It's really of all movements that seek a just and compassionate world. At the core of them is this love and reverence of life. So we, in that first talk, we reflected on the barriers, really what stops us and how to begin to deepen our attention. This talk, I thought we'd continue by looking at the primary layer of our barriers to love. And it's really a reaction to the life we call self, the life that's right here. And as we know, far from that Namaste, that honoring or cherishing the life that's right here, we're often in great resistance, whether it's the form of neglect or judgment or hatred or shame, but we don't have a very evolved and loving relationship with ourselves for the most part.

So it feels really critical to look at this. Like how can we move towards more tenderness, more open-heartedness with our own being? And the key understanding is that you can't be down on yourself or at war with yourself and embrace the world because the life that's right here is part of the world. So I thought I'd begin with a story, some of you at least will remember from way back. It's the Velvetine Rabbit. I'm going to read a little to you. Real isn't how you were made, said the skin horse. It's a thing that happens to you when a child loves you for a long, long time,

not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real. Does it hurt? asked the rabbit. Sometimes, said the skin horse, for he was always truthful. When you're real, you don't mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, he asked, or bit by bit? It doesn't happen all at once, said the skin horse. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges or have to be

carefully kept. Generally, by the time you're real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you're real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand. So our realness, our sacredness becomes apparent. It comes forward as we love. love ourselves are loved into healing. And loving, which is part of our realness, makes our full realness possible. I love the way James Baldwin put it. It's so powerful.

He says, love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I'm going to say that again. love takes off the mass that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. So it's not easy. The path of loving, of removing the mass, requires being vulnerable, requires tolerating pain. But what makes it worth it is that depth in us that knows, that, We just long for love and we long for reality more than we want to stay inside those masks,

more than we want to be protected, really. So that's what makes it workable and worth it. You might remember, I share this frequently because it's so valuable to me, that story of the Golden Buddha that I told a couple of weeks ago and how the gold of the Buddha was hidden under plaster clay covering it. and it was hidden for centuries. And it's natural that we all have those ego coverings. It's natural that we have habits of defending and protecting and enhancing ourselves.

And when we're really fearful, when we feel really separate from others, that covering gets very solid. So it blocks out the gold. We don't remember the gold. We don't remember who we are when we're caught in it. We're identified. We're identified with the mask or the coverings, and we forget the truth of our being, our realness. And again, the skin horse says, real isn't how we were made.

In other words, real isn't that outer covering of plaster and clay. There's something more formless, intrinsic, and pure. That's who we are. So the process of spiritual awakening is that we shine awareness. We shine the light of awareness on what's right here, and it may be the coverings that we are shining the light of awareness on, but we see them. And we bring the warmth of awareness, that's love, to those coverings, because that's what dissolves them, so they're more transparent so that the gold can shine through.

And what happens, and this is an experience some of you probably can really relate to, that as we become more mindful of our patterning of the different coverings, we realize, oh, I am not that covering. I am not that anxious self or that needy self. I'm not that lonely self. This formless presence, this loving awareness is more the truth of who I am than those coverings around the goal. So that's the process.

We're shining the light of awareness to see the coverings, the warmth of awareness, to dissolve the solidity so that the gold of who we are, that that wakefulness, open-heartedness, creativity, aliveness can shine through. I'm very struck by one line from Rumi who says, it's through love that all pain turns to medicine. We need the light and warmth of awareness

to experience the pain of our coverings and have a turn into the medicine, into the beauty and goodness. So here's the catch-22, and it's something most of us are familiar with, that we know the teaching, we're supposed to love ourselves into healing, and we're supposed to face the different coverings

and conditionings and ego states and love ourselves through it. And the most fundamental layer of conditioning, this is the layer we're most identified with, is the layer this averse-a-versive. to our own coverings. So let me say there may be a different way of saying it, but if our coverings, let's say the painful coverings are aggression or defendedness or jealousy or hate, we hate ourselves for those

coverings. That's the deepest layer of covering. So that's the catch-22 that we're supposed to love our coverings, love the parts of our ego self so that they can be freed up, but we're already in a biochemistry of not liking ourselves. So I want to just take a few moments to sense how we get so stuck in that, how hard it is to open our hearts to ourselves. And really, if you think of it that here we are, we're pack creatures, and there's an evolutionary function for this feeling of personal badness. so when negative emotions come up we immediately don't like ourselves for them and it's because we have this master emotion shame

it's that very painful belief or feeling something is wrong with me and it was installed there every emotion has its intelligence so we'd adjust our behaviors and not get kicked out of the out of the pack, so we wouldn't be rejected. And way back when it was totally life or death in terms of survival, and of course for emotionally it still feels like life or death. Well, that gets amplified because we also have a negativity bias that fixates on what's wrong. So carry this through the thousands of years of evolutionary unfolding and in current society we're still rigged with this sense, this very deep sense that comes up in us of something is wrong with me. When we have behaviors and feelings that we're afraid will get us rejected. What's really sad is that for so many

of us, that shame button is jammed. In other words, it's on all the time. The conditioning is whatever comes up that we call a negative emotion added to it, is, I shouldn't be feeling this, something's wrong with me. That's what I mean when I say, the shame button is jammed. So for most of us, shame, which had an evolutionary function back then, is toxic. It doesn't serve a useful function. It doesn't, it's not a message that says, oh, here's some helpful feedback, you need to change your behavior. It's a core feeling of badness that is a prison in our lives. It imprisons us. And what it does, if we go back to our metaphors of the golden Buddha, is it's the covering that glues our identity to all the other

coverings. In other words, we think who I am is this selfish self or this anxious self, and it obscures the gold. The something wrong message, just a little bit more on it. It's delivered by our families, for the most part, by whoever our caregivers are with the messages of you're too selfish or you're too needy or your trouble. I saw a cartoon with a dog and a psychiatrist's couch, and he said, it's right on the fence.

Beware of dog. How is that supposed to make me feel? So we get these messages that tell us what's wrong with us. and depending on how secure our attachment is, those messages can either sink into the core or else they're not as troublesome. And then another story, a little boy's overheard praying to God and he's saying, Lord, if you can't make me a better boy, don't worry about it. I'm having a really good time as I am.

So that's more of the exception. For most of us, we're really concerned about. others' judgment. We're concerned about how we're seen, we're concerned about being loved and approved of, and we get very snagged by messages of not being enough, of falling short. And it often starts quite early on those messages and sometimes we have that sinking feeling of not being a good person, it's hard to even track it because there wasn't some major trauma, but it comes in sometimes smaller ways. One story that's coming to mind right now

that stay with me for decades is of a little girl going to a restaurant with her family and they order their meals and she says to the waitress, you know, I want a hot dog, French fries and a Coke and father says, oh no, she won't. She's having, you know, meatloaf and carrots and potatoes and milk or whatever he said.

says, the waitress looks at the little girl and says, so what do you want on that hot dog, hun? Well, the family's kind of shocked and frozen. And after she, the waitress leaves, the little girl looks at her parents and says, she thinks, I am real. You know, often growing up, we're seen as an object that's either not cooperating or not acting as desired or a good self, who's sometimes winning approval, grades and looks, but still an object, not real. And again, it's not because parents are bad people. They're in their own stress, and when we're stressed,

we forget the subjectivity and realness of each other. The origins of shame messages, it's from hierarchical society. Something's wrong if you don't have the intelligence that's most valued or the looks or the kind of body or the kind of jobs and so on. And as we've talked a lot about here, the most harming messages are from our social caste systems where groups of others are considered inferior. Something's wrong with immigrants or with those who are not white,

those who are trans, those who are from certain religions. is impossible to compute the horror, the impact of the message, especially when it's systemic of your inferior, the suffering, the anger, the shame, the hatred that circles around that. It really is the great wound of our society, the messages of bad other, and it affects us all. So shame is exacerbated by societal caste systems. And individually, every single one of us is wired to not like our own conditioning.

To get identified with our fears and our addictions and think that's who I am and forget the depth of our being. So this is a long way of saying we're in a catch-22. that the healing comes from seeing and loving our being, seeing and loving the conditioning and so it can become more transparent, and yet we have an aversion to it. And many live in that suffering. The good news is it is possible to remember the gold. And the reason is that the goal, that loving awareness, it's more fundamental. mental than any of the conditioning, the coverings.

The gold is always there under the coverings, just the way the sun is always there, regardless of how cloudy it is. The gold is there no matter how much we forget it and don't trust it or believe that it's there. And because of that, we can call on some of that light and warmth in freeing or heart. ourselves. Again, through love, all pain will turn to medicine. It helps to remember, I think this is part of the Skin Horse's message, is it's gradual. And we don't start with calling forth full-blown radical love to heal ourselves. So when I guide a meditation, say,

put your hand on your heart and bathe yourself with love, sometimes that's not available. The coverings are too thick. But we can start with some simple slight movement towards shining the light and warmth of awareness. And which is really our willingness to pause when we're stuck and allow our experience to be there. To pause and just say, okay, it's here. You know, I'm remembering a friend, Seana Shapiro, who's a friend, Shana Shapiro was a teacher. She has a wonderful new book out. It's good morning. Good morning. I love you. So she describes her experience. She's going through a difficult divorce and

she wakes up each morning with this pit of shame, that that deep sense of something is intrinsically wrong with me. She was working with a meditation teacher and the meditation teacher suggested to her what about saying to yourself, I love you, Shauna. Say that every morning. Shawna says, no way. So her teacher gave her an alternative. She says, well, how about just putting her hand on your heart and saying, good morning, Shauna.

That she could do. So this is a slight movement, okay? So that's what she practiced regularly. And a few months later, her teacher said, okay, you're ready for the advanced practice, which is, good morning, I love you, Shauna. And the next morning she did it, and she was just going through the motions, and she didn't feel anything. But she wasn't, you know, riveted with aversion either. So she kept it up.

And here's the deal. Whatever you practice gets stronger. And so what she found one morning, she put her hand on her heart, and she did it. And she felt her grandmother's love and her mother's love and her own love. And she had established a pathway of kind attention. little bit by little bit. So this is the way we start when we're in that Catch-22 of having this conditioning, defensive, judgmental, jealousy, whatever, and then hating ourselves for it.

We begin by just pausing and noticing it's there, you know, good morning, and allowing it to be there. We don't have to like shower it with love if there's not love there, but the allowing is the beginning of love. Allowing and then deepening into accepting is the beginning of love. For those of you that are familiar with Rain, which this is an acronym of practice, it's recognized, allow, investigate, nurture,

your antennas might be up because what I've been describing this kind of gentling into loving ourselves are the first two steps of rain. that we just recognize and allow. Good morning. I see you there. Okay?

So what grows the loving? What starts to let the gold come forth more? That's where the I investigate and the end come in. The investigate is like saying with awareness that we're going to shine more light on what's there. And the nurturing is we're going to bring more warmth. just to take them step by step, investigating brings a closer attention. So let's say we're feeling a lot of dislike for ourselves

or hatred for ourselves for our own defensiveness or being judgmental. It's investigate where we gentle in. We kind of bring a deeper attention to where the vulnerability is under what we're seeing. And again, remember, the skin horse said it, you know, admitted, it hurts some. Because as you're investigating, you're beginning to take off the mask. You're beginning to unlayer things and get into the

realness, the vulnerability that's there. And vulnerability is basically your experience, your initial experience of being without coverings, of actually contacting what's underneath the coverings, the more core level of feelings of hurt or fear. So you're getting more awake. And that's what we, in investigate, we have to be very, very gentle so that we can, that's what I call it, gentling in, so we can tolerate it. But there's a key moment in investigating, and this is what I want to be emphasizing in this talk, where as we begin to sense the vulnerability, the loss or the hurt that's underneath the coverings, we start getting more tender. There's a key moment where we really get, oh, this hurts.

And there's some witnessing that then says, oh, okay, you know, feeling a little tender towards our being. And that's what sets the whole stage for full nurturing. I'll give you an example of this that touched me deeply. A teacher, I know, was offering a mindfulness course in a maximum security prison. And one of the women in the class she was teaching, this is a woman who was over six feet tall, large woman with bright dyed red hair and tattoos and very intimidating to others. She was known in the ward as being a bully, and she protected some women and relentlessly insulted and intimidated others. And during the meditation classes, when everybody joined in for the discussion, she was sit there silent and often scowling, but she never missed a session.

And this is during an eight-week course. And at the final class, the teacher did a kind of go-round and asked people what they got out of it, really. And this woman said, well, what I liked was that poem about the pirate. Now, to fill you in, some of you might be familiar, Ticknod Hans, Zen Master wrote a poem. It's very well known. Call me by my true names. I'm just going to read you a few pieces of it. of it. I'm a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I'm the grass snake that

silently feeds itself on the frog. I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat and throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I'm also the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true name so I can hear all my cries and laughing. at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names so I can wake up and the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. So that was the poem she was referring to and she said well that got me thinking it made me know something. And she was speaking really softly people were leaning in straining to hear. She said all my life I was the bad one, the problem one. And now I know I'm suffering too. And the group was really quiet

and still, and she had tears in her eyes, but everybody was just looking at the floor, kind of respecting her words. And as my friend described, at that group graduated, and this woman continued on, but she was changed in a really deep way. She wasn't a bully anymore. She was a much sadder, quieter person, just slowly coming to terms with the realness of her suffering, and through that, I would suspect, the realness of her being. We need to contact the hurting places inside us, the places we haven't been willing to feel, to open that tenderness towards ourselves. That's the way compassion works. We have to be touched by the suffering to really open with compassion.

So here's the next piece then. How does that nurturing come into its full bloom, that compassion, that care? And we all need a pathway to really bringing it alive. And it's an experiment. So once we've in some way become touched by the suffering that's here, how do we really express and bring a lie of nurturing. And what I found is that most people have to experiment, and it doesn't matter what you think is the source of the loving.

For some people, it's their own, they're able to feel their own heart holding themselves and sending love inward, and we call that loving yourself. And for others, it may be some divine figure, a spiritual deity, and they imagine some formless presence showering them with love. And other people might sense it coming from their dog or their grandmother or the natural world, the trees, or a friend. It doesn't matter what you think the source is. Any source that has some felt sense of warmth,

if you begin to more and more sense that loving, you're in touch with loving. It's like every will goes down to the ocean. And what I have found is that the more we repeat and deepen the pathway that wakes us up, wakes up our hearts, the more readily accessible it is. So for me, I very often, you know, and finding your pathway can involve words and images and so on. For me, very often there's some sense of my small self in some way bowing, some larger formless, light-filled warmth of loving, you know, a presence that's loving. And I imagine it showering me and bathing me.

And then there's a dissolving because the warmth of loving dissolves the shell of ego and emerging with that. And then there's just being love. And in those moments, it's very clear that there was no small self. I'm not a small self and there was no other out there. It's all one. But I needed that pathway to remember, to reconnect. So we all need to experiment and find what works and then practice with it for me because I do that in just like a few moments, you know, that kind of sense of bowing and surrendering the small self into this vast loving presence because I've done

tens and thousands of times, it's very readily available. I've also found that to deepen that loving and that nurturing sense, it's really useful to work with things that are not the core wounds that most are ripping us up, but to practice with places where we've just turned on ourselves a bit. We're just judging ourselves a bit. and by way of example, because the habit of turning on ourselves, that habit of self-shaming, of thinking, oh, something's wrong, is so deeply wired. So I saw the power of bringing rain and nurturing again and again to something not as deep

recently as I was struggling with my very real incompetencies. in the world of technology. You know, I have these small areas I can navigate through, but I've got no flexibility, so if anything goes off with my computer, with any program, with any app, anything, my brain flatlines. So it's just like a complete freeze,

and then I've become this damsel in distress, and I have to call out to my tech guru, husband, Jonathan. And he sometimes looks at my computer files with disbelief and wonder that I can even find. at all. Jonathan's one of the most patient, helpful, generous people I know, and my disorder and dysfunction around technology can drive him to the edge. So, you know, he'll say, well, what's your password? And I'll say, you know, because I have terrible organization around passwords. Well, I'm telling you all this because I get caught. I get stuck in that, you know,

that helplessness, and I'll go to him with it, and he'll get a little irritated with me because I'm impossible to work with in those times. And then I go deeper into shame. And then when he fixes something, I'm so still caught in the biochemistry of feeling bad that I can't express gratitude in a way that really feels meaningful and he feels unappreciated, and you get the drift. Well, for these last months, I've had a lot of added, I've had to do a steep learning curve because, like so many, I've had to go online with a lot of things. And so one of my regular weekly challenges is recording and uploading and sending in Dropbox these talks to Leo, who then helps stream. And it's been very hard to get all the steps on my own. And I keep

having to turn to Jonathan. So I began practicing rain with that. And I'd get stuck. And before calling out, I'd recognize and allow, okay, you know, be pausing and breathing with and recognizing and allowing, okay, stuck, you know, feeling that sense of badness, of inability. And I'd investigate and there'd be this sense of a very small, young, incompetent part of me that was afraid of failing and feeling like I was failing. And then if I could really get in touch with that with the investigating, the real vulnerability, there'd be this kind of sorrow that comes up or sadness and this urge to be kind and then nurturing.

And for me, it's very simple. There's some part of me is going, okay, it's okay. But with an intentional kindness. And that reign of self-compassion calms me. It soothes me. There's more perspective. There's certainly more humor around everything and a lot more tolerance. And then when Jonathan helps me, I'm more able to listen because shame shuts down learning. So I'm more able to listen and catch on and actually the last few rounds. I've done it on my own, you know. been able to go through the steps on my own. But the real gift, and this is what I want to share

and comes back to the Vilbertine Rabbit, is that I'm loving myself back into realness. I'm no longer in that identity of this incompetent, failing self or something's wrong with me. You know, I'm resting in a larger beingness and tenderness. And doesn't mean that I have much competency, but it doesn't make me intrinsically bad. Again, the skin horse to the rabbit. Once you are real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand. So coming back into realness,

the places where we're falling short are true in some relative sense, but they don't define us anymore. We're not identified. So this is the process of undoing the coverings. Having the light and warmth of awareness help to release the identities and help us to discover that sacredness, that gold.

And that's basically this class. We're just exploring how loving can be a pathway to realness, how we can come home to who we are without. the mass. And we'll practice in a bit, but I just want to name that we can't do it alone. We're pack animals and so we do need the mirroring of others. We need the awareness of others to see us and to love us and help us let go of the small self-stories. And we'll be exploring that in the weeks to come as we move forward. I started off with Namaste and and we'll end in the same spirit with a short guided meditation on how we can open up and bow to our inner world.

So, why don't you take a moment to make sure you're sitting in a way that's comfortable and balanced, alert, at ease? We'll do a little reflection on coming home to sacred presence. and I invite you to, in this pause, take a few full breaths to do a brief smile down, meaning just smile into your eyes, slight smile at the mouth, and smile into your heart, and just sense the heart space that's there. And you might scan and notice if there's any place, any part of you that you've been in some way down to, on at war with, judging. I wouldn't pick something that has trauma with it or where you feel a real deep sense of hatred. Let's work together with some place that's kind of in a daily

or weekly way you just notice that you turn on yourself for. It might be a way that you're behaving with others around you, family, friends, online, eating behaviors, ways of working, ways of thinking. It may be some way that you just keep seeing yourself falling short, as I did with computers and technology. And when you've got something in mind to recognize it, to recognize a situation that triggers you, that turns you against yourself, where you can sense that deeper covering of, I don't like how I'm being. Allow it to be there. And just sense by allowing you're just pausing, saying, okay, this is the covering or mask that's emerged right now. Not liking of judging. And within,

investigate, and I use the words gentling in, a very soft, gentle, curious attention. And just discover under the ideas and thoughts, just what you're feeling. For me, there was some helplessness, the felt sense of badness, kind of a sinking feeling, chest and belly. You might check your throat and chest and belly. even sense, well, what's the worst part of this? What really turns me on myself? So that you're in touch with the vulnerability of feeling judged, feeling not okay,

just noticing what it's like. And for some, you might sense how long you've been feeling that and how it's affected your life, how it's distanced you from others, and really from your own heart. And you might sense as that woman in prison did, the insight of, wow, I'm suffering too. This hurts. Ouch.

And I invite you to bring your hand to your heart. And begin the nurturing and sense whatever source of loving you can call on. It might be your own high self or more awake heart. It might be someone you know loves you. you that you trust. It might be a dog, might be grandmother or child, might be a spiritual teacher, healer, might be a spiritual figure, a deity, might be formless, just sense the warmth of that being spreading through you, going right to the place of vulnerability, knowing that this

is an ongoing experiment to sense the pathway to nurturing, being patient. But feel your longing. There may be some place in you that's saying, please love me. And that'll help to connect you with the love itself. Let your intention be to let in love to the place of vulnerability. Sense how the warmth of loving begins to soften things. And begin to notice the quality of presence that's, here right now. Really your own presence, your own heart. Noticing the difference from when you

started as more identified as in some way a failing self, a not enough self, a not okay self. And this space of presence that's really the truth of who you are, the gold, the realness. Trust this. Rest in this. Knowing this is the truth of your being, is. It's a truth of your being. the healing is the medicine. You might sense this heart space, this shared heart space, that we all wake up to, and sense that you can offer your namaste, your bow to the life that's right here, the aliveness in this body, the particular ways this life form has taken expression, that you can namaste, bow to that. You can sense others in your life that come to mind and sense how the same light and spirit of the gold shines through, how their

realness shines through the covering and bow to that in them. And we can imagine together that this is the world we can create, a world where we move through seeing and revering the sacred in all beings in ourselves and all life. So in that spirit, I'd like to close with the final message of Congressman John Lewis, many may have heard or read. You might take a moment to pause and breathe. Let it in. He tells us, though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I've done all I can to demonstrate the way of peace, the way of love and non-violence, is the more excellent way. Now does your turn to let freedom ring.

So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide. Let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide. love, be your guide. Okay, my friends, taking a few full rest and opening your eyes. A deep namaste, a deep bow of namaste to each of you, and I look forward to being with you again. Thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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