Tara Brach - Radical Self-Honesty: The Joy of Getting Real

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Radical Self-Honesty: The Joy of Getting Real - Our suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt, resisted parts of our psyche. This talk explores ways we can deepen self-honesty and reconnect to a wholeness of being that enables us to live with spontaneity, confidence, wisdom and love (a favorite from the archives). A quote by Elizabeth Lessor from the talk: "My prayer to god every day: Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears."

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. So I'm just back from retreat and there's some of you sitting here that were part of our week long and one of the stories, and this wasn't from this retreat but that really illustrates I think the experience of deepening practice. one young man went to a week-long retreat and he described at the end this incredible rollercoaster of ups and downs

these moments of incredible stillness or joy and a sense of being in the flow and then other moments where he's just caught in obsessing and comparing with other people and jealousy and he said you know I get it that the joy is in getting real It doesn't have to do with any particular mind state.

The joy is in finding that presence and space that really has room for this changing life. The title of this talk is radical self-honesty, the joy in getting real. And the idea is they really go together that our basic suffering arises from the undisive, seen, unfelt, unincluded parts of our psyche. That's where the suffering comes from. And when we pull away from any part of our lived experience, what happens is that we have to erect defenses

and we have to keep on erecting them to keep a distance from what we really don't want to feel. So those are the stories, the justifications, the reactive emotions, and so on. So there's always this undercurrent of fear and deficiency when we're not being real and honest with what's right here. And what happens is that our identity gets organized around the defense system, around all the ways we're trying to get what we want and avoid being seen and controlling things, sometimes described as a false self. That becomes our sense of who we are.

And the Buddha described our real suffering is we're forgetting our true nature. We get organized around a kind of sliver of defenses or aggression, stories, narratives, and forget the heart and awareness that are here. So the path to getting real is really the practices we're doing, which are learning to see and name and really contact the life that's here moment to moment. That means our aggressiveness, you know, where we have thoughts that aren't so savory, where we get competitive, where we want to in some way be better than others, where we get obsessed with how we look, where there's just a lot of focus on self,

which itself can be embarrassing. But we start just acknowledging, okay, we acknowledge the ways we mislead, exaggerate. This is radical self-honesty and it takes a real commitment because the process means we're having to experience that sense of taboo that what we're touching into isn't so well regarded by our self and our culture. We have to be willing to do that. So it's a courageous path. So I was sharing about the summit retreat, and one man wrote a note, and he titled It Feels True,

and I'll read to you what he wrote, Settling into what is here, what is true, the felt sense that I ate too much, sit with the fear that I'm getting fat, hand on belly, I offer compassion, and receive instead confirmation. I remember the first time I went to the Insight Meditation Society, there was a sign-up, and it was a quote by Lily Tomlin, which is self-knowledge isn't necessarily good news. So I want to share a classic fable. Some of you'll remember this from a few years ago that I think gives us really good guidance in getting real, getting honest with the more challenging layers of our psyche. and in this it's a story about a monk that lived in northern India.

He was known as a kind of a brother of mercy. He was a healer. And a healer who could really breathe with people and hold a space of deep kind of acceptance that allowed people just to unfold themselves because they felt his good heart. But he did this for years, but then he became exhausted. He just felt like something was off or missing and dispirited. So he had heard about a great teacher who lived many hundreds of miles in the South,

an older woman whose reputation had spread far and wide. She was a Buddhist nun, and he decided he was going to go visit her reputation with she was profoundly laser-like deep in her insights, and her capacity to guide people to really contact truth. So he goes off to find her, and he walks. It's a walking pilgrimage, and the first night he goes to a temple where many other pilgrims stayed and encounters an old nun there, and he tells his story how he became dispirited in his practice

and exhausted without inspiration. And she was sympathetic to a situation. She offered to guide him to the residence of this great teacher that he was seeking. So they arrive at the edge of a bustling village and are warmly received because the old nun had been none other than the much-loved wise woman he was seeking. Over the year, she taught him how to empower others by allowing them to discover the nature of reality, how they could contact and cultivate a deep understanding by really diving into just what's real and true in the moment.

So, many years later, as she lay dying, she beckoned him to her side and she said, there's something I never told you. On that day we met, I too had lost heart. I was headed north seeking a great, compassionate healer I had heard about. Then she smiled and squeezed his hand and peacefully passed away. So how might we understand this? How do we sense these two qualities? They really were part of a whole.

Their qualities they brought to others, they were really part of each other. They belonged together. And the old nun represented to me this path of radical self-honesty of having that courage to really look at what's true and name it and acknowledge it and open to it.

And the monk had that quality of radical self-acceptance. where whatever was seen was held in compassion. And we need them both. There's no way that we'll be really honest with ourselves, really contact truth, unless there's some space that's forgiving, tender kind that can hold it. We need them both.

Sometimes this radical self-honesty is described as the Vodra sword. Vodra is this diamond-like sword of enlightenment that cuts through the veils of delusion. to really see what's there. And this compassion as this vast, empty, radiant heart that has room for this world. So we need them both.

And I found in the Christian Desert fathers a really beautiful example of the same path of awakening with these two. Sometimes you might consider them two wings of awareness. And the Desert Fathers have this practice of recognizing the thoughts of the heart, which are they call the stories, the thoughts, the emotions that entraped.

And they're described as demons only in that they're the shadow side that when we don't know about them, in other words, when they're not an awareness, they can cause trouble, suffering. So the practice would be for Desert Fathers to do this radical self-honesty of investigating the thoughts of the heart and then bring and name it to an elder called the Abba. the Abba, which really represents that field of compassion, bringing the truth into that field of compassion.

The understanding was when the heart is open to the light of truth, when there are no secrets, the demons have nowhere to hide. They can't begin stirring up obsession and crafting their illusions. So we become more transparent, open to the divine light. I think we'd find in any great path. any path of reality, of true insight and heart, these qualities of radical self-honesty and radical self-acceptance. And I love the phrasing, we become more transparent as we wake up.

The light can shine through. So one of the metaphors for how the veils arise and how we get caught in a kind of more deluded egoic state, is of course the Garden of Eden. And the Desert Fathers, their understanding was the fall was not disobedience. The fall into egoic state was because Adam and Eve hid. Okay?

It wasn't, okay, so eat the apple, but it was the hiding. And they believed that originally were innocent, naked, not covered over, and then believed And believing in badness, we have to cover ourselves over, disguise ourselves for ten, develop strategies to protect and defend. I thought that was an interesting way to frame it. And it reminded me of this story of a little boy who opened the old big family Bible and was fascinated with it.

He's looking through those old pages and then something fell out of the Bible. Picked it up and looked at it closely. It was a leaf from a tree that had been pressed between pages. Mama, look what I found, he called out. And the mother said, what have you have there, dear? And he said, with astonishment, it's Adam's suit. So radical self-honesty begins with recognizing the patterning of our false self, of the parts of us that are covering over and trying to present something.

And it's useful to think of the false self. And by the way, false doesn't mean bad. It just means that we're identified with something that's not true. true. It's not the truth of who we are. You can think of the false self as emerging from three core drives and they're represented through the layering of our brain, that the reptilian brain has us act to avoid harm. And the mammalian brain has us act in ways to enhance pleasure to enlarge and prove upon ourselves.

It's approaching reward basically. And the primate brain is the part of our brain that's very involved with attachment, making sure, you know, because survival depends on being attached and connected to others. So let's just look a little more closely at these three because again, we're really trying to understand in our own lives how we go into trance because we get fixated on avoiding harm or fixated on a reward or fixated on attachment. And that fixation, we forget who's here. So the reptilian brain.

And just listen to see if you sense yourself here. We'll do little reflections as we go. While we face dangers to our survival, the major dangers are felt psychologically as a fear of failure, a fear of our own deficiency, a fear that we're going to make mistakes. That's the big one that usually gets us. There's a story of a reporter who asks a bank president, very well known in the business world. Sir, what's the secret of your success? And the response is two words.

Okay, what are they? Right decisions. And how do you make the right decisions? One word. And, sir, what is that? Experience. And how do you get experience? Two words.

And, sir, what is that? wrong decisions. You understand? It's like, that's it. We're afraid to make mistakes. So there's an underlying belief that we're not enough, that we have to try harder.

Just watch your life and notice if that's there, that I need to do more try harder to be okay. And we spend many moments trying to avoid danger, avoid failure that's around the corner by obsessing and worrying and planning and judging and blaming. So, let our first reflection be on this. Just take a moment, close your eyes.

And reviewing today, perhaps the last few days, just notice when your mind, your behaviors where were occupied or driven by the fear of danger, that something was going to go wrong, that you were going to lose something, that you're going to fall short, that you weren't going to get somewhere on time and there were going to be consequences or get something done on time and there were going to be consequences. Or maybe it was more of a physical sense of endangerment. Something's really wrong with your body or that somebody else was in danger.

If you have one example in your mind of where that insecurity was driving you, the fear was driving you, you might take a moment to kind of go inside that situation and just notice what the sense of your self is. Like who are you when you're in that mind state? How do you experience yourself? You can continue meditating, just listen for a moment that the second, you can continue meditating, the second area, the mammalian brain, has to do with seeking rewards. You might reflect again through the last few days, how many moments were you in some way

pursuing something, food, sex, comfort, some mental reward of beauty, money, possessions. It's part of the job of the survival brain to seek enhancement advantage. When was that so? And again, just take a moment if there's one example of where you were in some way fixated on getting what you wanted, more pleasure, more comfort. It's your sense of yourself when you're in that mode. And do you like yourself? Open your eyes when you're ready.

Okay, so a reminder, and we've only covered two of the three, that this is totally universal, natural programming. that when we sense harm, we avoid it. And then we kind of shrink into the, you know, avoiding fearful, defended self. And when we sense some reward, there's some grasping. And then we become the one who's pursuing and really using our mind and our energy to get what we want. That's just really natural.

There's one story of, in an old town, there were three stores on the main street, and they stood side by sides. they were completely connected. And they all sold the same kind of merchandise. So one day the owner of one of the stores and one of the ends put up a sign saying rock-bottom prices. And this prompted the store owner on the other side,

far the side, putting lowest prices in town. So the guy in the middle was kind of in a conundrum. He didn't know quite what to do with that, but these aggressive maneuvers. And then he had a bright idea, and he put up a sign saying, main entrance. So the third area

are our strategies for attachment and they often involve strategies to get attention, strategies to get approval, to be important, to be special. The more early unmet needs, the stronger the strategies.

And again, if we add a judgment to it, then we're just adding on to you know, the layering. But just to be honest, okay, so how am I seeking attention, seeking approval, fixating. So we begin to scan our relationships and notice, when am I wanting something from another person? When am I wanting something? And you might, again, just close your eyes for a moment. This is the primate brain that's very programmed to do what it's necessary to feel secure bonding. You might think of a recent time when you know that you were wanting something from somebody,

wanting their approval, their attention, wanting them to be attracted, wanting them to be impressed. And take a moment when you sense a place like that to step inside the who you are when you're in that mode and just sense it. This is part of the trance. This is the false self that we get identified with. So that part of this honesty is this recognition, again what in Buddhism is called suffering or dukkha and it doesn't have to be anquish.

It can be any sort of sense of discontent or something's off that when we're in these modes of wanting or trying to avoid harm or seeking reward and we get caught in them when they're outside of our awareness. Okay? They're natural but when they're outside of our awareness they are like veils that keep us from realizing who we really are. They're veils that keep us in a confined sense of self that's usually got a flavor of deficient and fearful. Okay, so opening your eyes. Okay, so that's the challenging part of things,

is that we have conditioning, we fixate, we get small, and now how these practices can help us just identify that, cleanly and kindly, and then wake up into something bigger. And so when we think of it, you can go back, we can use our example from Eden, okay? Again, we have our ancestral couple there. And the first thing is, you know, this story's got a lot of different versions. So there's this compelling thing to seek reward to get that apple, right? That's enhancing, it's pleasure, it's I want, right? So that happens. And then there's the fear of punishment. Whoops, bad shame got to cover up. That's the reptilian brain acting out. And then the primate brain's going in some way, oh man, we screwed it with our maker, you know, now I'm

guilty, I blew it. So you've got all the different parts of the brain involved on how the, you know, this is the emerging ego. And if you think to yourself, oh, what if they had had a little mindfulness training? And so we're able to say, you know, this grasping after an apple, it's just a condition to grasp, it's okay. It's just okay, sweetheart, you know, it's natural, right? And then there's that hiding and that sense of, oh, we're going to get punished, and in some way this sense of, you know, this is fear and it's real natural and there's a space that can hold it, you know, and just being with that fear and even noticing that sense of guilt and distance from God and saying, this too, this too.

It would have saved us many, you know, the millennia of neurosis. Okay, we'll move from that comparison. So here we are, and we know how we get a little bit of a sense of how the trance emerges and obscures who we are. So I'd like to share a very beautiful prayer that Elizabeth Lesser author and very deep, wise being, this is what she says. She says, this is my prayer to God every day. Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories

and my fears. Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears. So in that spirit that's really the heart of this practice, that we care about reality, that the only safety is reality, the only healing is reality. And I've seen over and over again the power of facing what's really here with honesty and kindness and how it frees. And one example that I shared in True Refuge, because the book True Refuge, because it touched me so much, a woman had come to a Buddhist retreat and she had asked for teachings on how to be present with someone who was dying. It was her husband. They had agreed that

she was going to come and do some practice because they were Catholics, but they had decided not to bring in a priest and that she was really going to keep him company during his passing. So she wanted guidance on how to really do that well. And her history was the sense of not getting it right and she had this belief she was going to blow it in some way. She had a lot of fear around how to be with this because it was the biggest and most important process she had ever engaged in, how to really accompany her husband. So she was basically saying, how do I do it right?

And what's Buddhism 101 on being with the dying? And really, my response was, just be present with him and love him, whatever comes up. And because of her Catholicism, I had just within a month had been, with Father Thomas Keating, we were both presenting at a conference on compassion, and he described his language for this kind of radical,

presence was, I consent. Whatever comes up, there's this honesty of really recognizing it, I consent. It's like saying yes in a cellular way. So I shared that with her and heard from her several weeks later and here's what had happened for her. She said she went through a process where she tried to say I consent and open to things but she did say one morning he brought up, you know, that he didn't have too long and she said, oh, honey, you're doing really well right now, let me make you some tea. And in that moment she felt like a thousand miles of distance opened up. What had she done? You know, she denied, turned away, right? So while she was making tea, she had the prayer, please, may I bring presence and love to

what's happening. And she said after those moments, whatever would come up, the fear, she'd say she'd really contact it, I consent, the feelings of doing it wrong, okay? I feel that, I consent. Her grief, the deep, deep grief, kept doing that. This is, she said, when I allowed myself to pause and come home to presence, I did know how to be with him. She intuitively sensed how to offer him, whispered words of encouragement and caring touch and to sing to him and when to be really quiet. She said that in those moments of reality, of reality of really contacting how it is with tenderness, she said there was no longer a sense of him and me but rather we were a field of loving, total openness, warmth, light. He's gone but that living field of loving

is always with me. So this is the gift of radical honesty and radical acceptance of what comes up. That when we offer that quality of presence to our life, we come into a reality that has a timeless love. We come into a reality where that's that transparency, where something very sacred shines through. And whether somebody's alive or somebody's dead, we're We're in touch with something that is bigger than the coming and the going. That is what's possible. So these are the basic elements of this process of radical self-honesty and the first element means letting go of the fixation, the doing, the fixing, the blaming, the judging, whatever

it is that we're fixated on, there's a letting go of that and turning inward to touch what's actually going on here. for her it was doing, this kind of endless doing that she kept, that she ran away from the moment with. For many of us it's blaming, whether it's ourself or another person. And I've come to find that in any moment of blame, whether it's somebody else or myself, in those moments I don't have access to the very place of aliveness that is asking for attention. Any moment of blaming keeps us from radical self-honesty. And that's challenging because we think, but I'm right. But that doesn't matter. There's still something that wants attention that if we

don't pay attention to, we can't really be at home with ourselves. The biggest challenge to self-honesty is a belief in our own badness. Yes, we judge others, but it's the fixation on something something's wrong with me that keeps us from being honestly with what's deep down in us. We think that self-judgment there's something a little bit like high-minded about it, like we're judging ourselves to improve ourselves and we're on our own case in a good way. But any judgment, any perfectionism prevents us from seeing what's here clearly. It takes us away from our own being. We can't be honest.

One man that I was working with some years ago shared with me his deepest shame, where he just felt wrong and bad. And it was that he disliked his teenage stepchild. And it's very hard for him to tell me that. He said that this young person had, you know, tantrum still, was angry, was rude. He cared about him. He had some compassion, but he really didn't like him. And he was tormented by his own feeling of badness and he felt like his aversion hurt his wife

who had her own challenges, you know, and trying to not be reactive. And he couldn't talk about it to her or to anyone. He even thought I would judge him, you know, to come to me and say, you know, I don't like my stepchild. And for me, I was just struck with the sadness of his suffering around something that's part of our natural conditioning. You know, when something's really unpleasant, we get aversive. We can't help it, just the way we're wired.

So, you know, so many parents struggle with feeling dislike towards their children, they can love them but not like them and guilty about it. And so many children feel guilty and bad about not liking their parents. In fact, the guilt gets in a way of touching the love that's there. So anyway, with him, I basically said what I'm saying now. I said, it's not your fault. It's just happening. Not like you decide to put it on the switch of dislike.

It just happens. And when I said that, it was like this release could happen. He really started crying because he had been living with this very toxic sense of shame. So he talked to his wife. And she had the same thing going on. So they were able to really hug and hold each other. And in fact, by naming it out loud, by getting real, they had more space to then respond with some equanimity through a very difficult phase of this young man's life.

Probably every one of us has had times of something we feel really ashamed about, whether it's some addiction or some way we've treated others or an obsession or a failure. might have had the experience of confessing it to someone and having them normalize it and the enormous relief. The enormous relief. So it's key to be able to start holding ourselves in that way, to be able to say, really, this is what's happening and it's really okay. I mean, I say to myself those words from that Hawaiian healer, I'm sorry, I'm sorry for all

the suffering that's going on, and I love you. And I say it a lot. I'm naming this out loud because we need to counter the self-aversion. So when I come into one of those conditioned experiences of trying to feel important or special or feeling jealous or lower or falling short or whatever the current neurosis is, I try to say, okay, this is the trance, this is what's going on right now. This is the narrative. this is the special person narrative or this is the falling short narrative.

And I'm sorry. And I love you. And that combo of the honesty and the tenderness allows me to relax back into a bigger reality. This is a poem by Dana Fault. She says, there is no controlling life, tight corraling a lightning bolt containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow,

and grace will carry you to higher ground. The only safety lies in letting it all in, the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures, and success. When loss rips off the doors of your heart, our sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth, truth. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed

to your new eyes. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. So this is the practice that requires real courage and intentionality because our conditioning is to keep doing the old patterns, to not look at the place places within us that are caught in a certain kind of trance that are living behind the veils. You know, I started tonight talking about the joy in getting real and there's different expressions that arise as we start facing what's here and opening to it. And there is really a freedom that comes. And you can imagine it, I've talked to so many people and said, well, what is it you really

long for and what they long for is to feel real with others, to feel authentic, to feel like they can be with other people and not have to pretend anything. And I'm inviting you right now to imagine and sense that, to actually be able to be just as you are at home in that, be able to trust that, be okay in that. So there comes a sense of being back in the garden, that we can be spontaneous and free and not cover over, and there is an amazing joy in that. And we sense it with children more easily than we sense it with adults, this joy in being real, and just being who we are.

Because they haven't been civilized to cover over so much, so we get to feel it. There's some grandparents that shared a few of their enjoyable moments with grandchildren. I'll share with you. My young grandson called the other day to wish me happy birthday. He asked me how old I was and I told him 62. He was quiet for a moment and then he asked, did you start at one?

A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like. We used to skate outside on a pond. I had a swing made from a tire, hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods. The little girl was wide-eyed taking this in.

At last she said, I sure wish I'd gotten to know you sooner. I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me. She was always correct. But it was fun for me, so I continued. At last, she headed for the door saying sagely, Grandma, I think you should try to figure out

some of these things yourself. Just one more, okay? These are fun. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, I'm not sure. look in your underwear, Grandma. He said, mine says I'm four to six. So the joy in getting real. Thus far, I've mostly spoken about getting real with ourselves.

And what it enables and what naturally occurs is that we live it with each other. It's also a practice with each other. It's a practice to be in touch with what feels most authentic and be able to express it and name it with others. And we're always relating. And so how much do we relate from realness? It's beautiful that way the Desert Fathers describe it,

that relationship that grows when somebody's able to say, okay, here's some shadow stuff and put it out there and the freedom in that. So many people know it through 12-step programs. Just to be able to say what's true, helps to remove the shame. And for many people in our community here and around the world and different spiritual communities, we have these spiritual friends groups, eight or ten people that meet every other week. And again, it's the naming truth in a space that's safe, that's

loving. We learn to do it in therapy and we learn to do it with friends and with our partners. Adrian Rich writes this. She says, An honorable human relationship, that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is the process of deepening the truth they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. So part of removing the veils happens when we're with each other and needs to be practiced there. Now, this is not the honesty that we sometimes describe as, I'm going to speak my truth. That often is an excuse to express our anger.

Do you know what I mean? We haven't done the process yet of the self-honesty that gets under the anger to where the vulnerability and care is. So we're speaking from a layer that's been unprocessed. And what happens is when we speak our truth and our truth is an unprocessed layer, then what comes out, which is blaming, creates defensiveness so we don't end up getting the results we want. It doesn't further understanding.

So we're talking about authentic truth-telling, which is really huge self-honesty, recognizing our wants and fears and naming that vulnerability without blame from the heart. And what I've seen over and over is more one of us does it, it creates safety for another. Mark Nipo, we waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering

is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances for joy. It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something and then forgetting we chose to put them on. We complain that nothing feels quite real. In this way, our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, but to un-glove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being soft and unrepeatable. The joy really is in getting real. If we're not in touch in a real way and open in a real way, then we're going to be afraid of what's there. And we're not going to have a real taste of the love, the creativity, and the beauty that's our essence.

So let's just take some moments to sit together and just feeling in your own words as a mental whisperer prayer, your aspiration to connect with what's true, to remove the veils, to be more transparent so that that light of the divine, that inner radiance can shine through so that we can see it in ourselves and each other and in all of life. And then in that spirit, just to bring your awareness to what's right here, to the feelings of sensation, to the mood that's right here, sensing the possibility of saying yes or I consent. Very deep tenderness to whatever is right here. It's very difficult.

You can send a message of comfort. I'm sorry and I love you. inquiry and presence is, what is happening right here? Can I let this be? Tenderness with love. The only safety lies in letting it all in, the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures and success. When loss rips off the doors of the heart or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth and the choice to like go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my

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