Tara Brach - Real But Not True: Freeing Ourselves from Harmful Beliefs (2016-06-01)

Episode Date: June 4, 2016

Real But Not True: Freeing Ourselves from Harmful Beliefs (2016-06-01) - Thoughts and beliefs are navigational maps that are not inherently true. Rather, some serve us and others cause feelings of separation, self-aversion and/or blame of others. We can free ourselves from harmful beliefs by investigating them with a dedicated, mindful and courage presence. This talk guides us in mindful investigation through an illustrative story, an outline of steps, and a guided meditation that addresses limiting beliefs surrounding interpersonal conflict. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to begin this talk with a few verses from Rumi. I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money, to climb over the fence and take my own vegetables, but no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival.

So this is one of my very favorite of verses. I love it because it says it so clearly that we pretty universally get into a trance, It's a kind of self-ego trance whereby we're injuring ourselves in each other with our thoughts, with our ways of acting. We're in some way judging and twisting and pinching ourselves in each other, controlling, defending. And as we become free of that selfing behavior, all the judging and controlling, as we become free of it, that light of the stars start shining through us.

we come home to who we really are. So trance is fueled. It's fueled, and this is, we'll keep coming back to, by the thoughts and the beliefs we have. It's the beliefs that in some deep way I'm not enough, or something's wrong with you, or no one will ever really love me, or I'll never really attract anyone,

or I'll never be close to anyone, or no one can ever really understand me, It's those core beliefs and then the thoughts that circle around them that really prevent us from trusting ourselves and trusting our life. And the thing about beliefs is that we believe them. I mean, we really think they're true. And it's like being in a movie theater and watching a movie and really think the movie is reality.

And the star of our movie, of course, is moi. So we're living in this universe where everything's organized around this, person who's easily offended and has all these judgments and thoughts that are like that ignorant fist, that keep causing injury. So Gandhi, and this has been also a kind of spiritual notion that many have offered forth, describes it how our beliefs create our thoughts and emotions and then they end up generating our behavior which creates our character, which creates our destiny. the idea being that the familiar pattern of thoughts that keep on cycling through our minds

actually end up creating and shaping our life experience, which means there's a lot of really good motivation to begin to learn how to step out of those patterns of thoughts that are pinching and squeezing our secret self. And so that's what I will be exploring tonight is, you know, what are really the individual and collective stories, what's the trance that we're in, that harms us, and how do we extricate? How do we free ourselves? So the very ground of our belief system at the core, and this is all organisms, is that I'm a separate self. our nervous system is wired to have that perception of separation. That doesn't mean we don't have the capacity to experience what's beyond it,

but we are rigged to have that sense of separation. And it's not a conscious one. It's just this persistent background notion of how it is, and it's sustained by our thoughts. Our thoughts are all dualistic. They all create a this and a that and a before and an after and a good and a bad and a right and a wrong. They divide up the world.

Without thoughts, there's a seamless flow of reality. With thoughts, it's fractured. Doesn't mean thoughts aren't useful, but it's fractured. So we have this background sense of a separate self, and along with that comes this sense of there's a problem because this separate self is vulnerable and it can be destroyed and it needs to latch on to things to get some advantage and promote itself.

So the whole universe of pushing away and grasping comes out of that core belief of I'm a separate self. Part of the cycling around that I'm a separate self, there's this feeling of vulnerability, a feeling of fear, something's going to go wrong. In fact, the primal mood of the separate self is fear. Because we're going to die and the separate self feels that. So it's always tensing against its own death. Along with that fear or other painful emotions of loss and so on,

so there's a I feel bad and that quickly converts into I am bad. And I invite you to check that out how when we're feeling bad that translates into something's wrong with me. Just investigate that one. Feeling bad turns to I'm bad. And it also turns into your bad. And then we, of course, go into all the, what Rumi described. We start stealing vegetables and start controlling and judging and so on.

So it's really helpful to know that our core beliefs about ourselves don't originate with our individual life. They get exacerbated. When we have really difficult early history, they get very much exacerbated. we all have core beliefs that are kind of fear-based and they're shaped by our culture and by this original way that our nervous systems organized. When you think about it, religious beliefs like original sin, okay, it didn't just pop out of a core sense of, oh, I'm an evil being, you know, it just, it's conditioned. I love the way Annie Dellerit puts it.

She says somewhere and I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you didn't know. Then why asked the Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me? So we have these core beliefs that are fear-based and they build this whole strata of what's right and what's wrong and what's good what's bad. And, you know, we think that it's our belief, but it's definitely programmed in by our culture. I sometimes pull out these answers that children give at Bible school when they're developing their understanding of, you know, their understanding of the world and how things

happen. This is a few of the responses to the questions of a quiz. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived, they found Jesus in the manager. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta. These are true answers, really. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar.

He fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times. The seventh commandment is, Thou shalt not admit adultery. One more. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony. So our beliefs, where they come from.

Now, the individual beliefs we have about the self in the world that cause suffering really arise from our experiences of severed belonging. And by that I mean the real wounding experiences that happen early on when we're in some way rejected or punished for how we are. And, you know, we've fallen short of the standards that are set by our parents that in order to be really lovable and acceptable, you need to look a certain way and act a certain way and succeed a certain way and so on. And so early on, we get the message that there's a lot about us that's not okay, whether it's

that we're too aggressive or too selfish, are not cooperative enough, jealous, you know, whatever it is. And what happens when we get those messages is that that feeds this core belief of something's wrong with me and it gets very solidified and then we seek evidence for it. And as many of you know that our evolutionary negative bias, we really glom on to anything that comes our way that confirms that sense of badness. And you might wonder, well, how come we would do that? Why would we want that?

But in a way, it's our way of protecting ourselves. We'd rather have a firm sense of, oh, this is how I am. Now I can defend myself, you know, or not show other people who I am because of it, than not knowing. So we're believing something untrue when we're suffering. And this is one of the things that keeps coming around to me again and again, that when I'm having a hard time, if I ask myself, well, what am I believing? I'm in those moments I'm subscribing to one of those internalized

or from the culture or early child or whatever beliefs that something's wrong with me. Let me ask you to reflect for a moment. Let's get you involved with this in a more direct way. And as you pause, just take a moment to bring yourself right here, just breathe and feel your body and feel your heart and bring to mind a relationship that matters to you that has some element of tension or conflict or distance. The relationship that you wish was going more smoothly,

had more connection, but there's something going on. A conflictual relationship. One that's got tension, one that creates hurt or anger, fear. You take some moments to let yourself kind of get close in so you can sense what it is about this relationship that evokes a sense of tension, of hurt or fear, anger. And then ask yourself, as I just mentioned earlier, so what is it that I'm believing? What am I believing about myself or about this other person?

Is it that I'm bad, I'm falling short, you're bad, you shouldn't fill in the blanks? what does it mean to you about yourself given what's going on or about the future? What are you believing? Is the belief that reflects a kind of victimized position or a bad personhood that you're just really not behaving right? And sense how familiar the belief is, have you had this belief in other relationships? Is it feel historically familiar? see if you can do this without judging, with a kind of interest, just examining.

So what's it like when I'm living in a belief that ends up causing separation? And know that in the same way that we do this individually, we do it collectively, that we all have shared collective beliefs that cause suffering in our larger society. of either, usually the beliefs, the collective beliefs are in some way that we're better than. Are we might, if the beliefs are set by the dominant culture, it's usually good, bad, you know, I'm good, you're bad. You can see in the United States the implicit bias where white people are considering themselves on top, superior, deserving more.

They assume to have, and I say we assume to have access to the best jobs to housing. It's an unconscious assumption for many of others as inferior, but sense how collectively it fuels separation, social injustice, violence. Unless we deepen attention to our personal or collective beliefs, separation continues. You can open your eyes if you'd like. I think often of stories I read about a camp that took together Palestinian and Israeli teenagers who were really locked in their collective psyches and their cultural beliefs about good, bad, right, wrong, okay?

As you all know. And had these Palestinian-Israeli teens come together at a camp for a number of weeks and they practiced there really was based in mindfulness. It was compassionate listening, really listening, speaking back what you hear. And so they're really getting to know each other. One of the things that touched me so much is how when they were leaving the camp, when Israeli girl said to a Palestinian girl, you know, if I don't know you, it's so easy to hate you. But if I look into your eyes, I can't.

Our beliefs keep us separate. but when we deepen our attention, then we start seeing past them. The light of the stars start shining through. But when they're there and they're not investigated, they're this veil between us and reality. And they actually prevent us from seeing truth. I mean, it's like we have a screen between us and reality and they can perpetuate all sorts of hardened patterning that we live in.

I read recently an essay that, Maria Popova had written out, and this was part of, I think, a talk at a graduation. I want to read you a part of it. She says, I live on my bike, that's how I get everywhere, and every other week, one of those first days of spring I was riding from Brooklyn to Harlem. I had somewhere to be in was peddling pretty fast, which I like doing, and I must admit, I take a certain silly pride in, but I also was also very much enjoying the ride in the river in the spring air. And then I sent someone behind me in the bike path catching up, going even faster than I was

going. It suddenly felt competitive. He was trying to overtake me. I peddled faster, but he kept catching up. Eventually he did overtake me and I felt strangely defeated. But as he cruised past me, I realized the guy was on an electric bike. I felt all sort of redemption and a great sense of injustice, unfair motorized advantage, very demoralizing to an honest, must.

muscle-powered peddler. But just as I was getting all self-righteously existential, I noticed something else. He had a restaurant's name on his back. He was a food delivery guy. He was rushing past me not because he was trying to slight me or because he had some unfair advantage, but because this was this daily strife. This is how this immigrant made his living. My first response was to shame myself and to gratitude for how fortunate I've been because I, too, am an immigrant from a pretty poor country and it's been some miraculous confluence of choice and chance that has kept me from being a food delivery person on electric bike in order to survive in New York City. And perhaps the guy has a more satisfying

life than I do. Perhaps he has a good mother and goes home to the love of his life and plays the violin at night. I don't know and I never well. But the point is this that as the second I began comparing my pace to his, my life to his, I'm vacating my own experience of that spring day and ejecting myself into a sort of. of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his. If you don't know of Maria Popova, she is the author of Brain Pickings, which is an absolutely awesome website. And what a...I mean this really, you can feel the Dharma in this so beautifully, this very

little incident and how often do we do that? You know, how often, you know, one woman wrote, I was, she was walking down Fifth Avenue and realized that for the last 10 minutes she'd comparing her body to every other woman's body she passed and then she said 10 minutes, I mean 10 years. How many moments are we living either comparing ourselves to somebody else in some way as better or worse or comparing to ourselves to our own internalized standard of how we should be? And in those moments we've vacated the premises.

We're not living from our whole. wholeness and we're not able to see truth. We're living in that veil of a false belief. What happens is that the pattern of it, let's say the pattern is you should be like this in order to be okay for me, in order for my life to be okay, it sets in and it creates really some very deep injury in our relationships. I've seen it span the decades. I've seen siblings not speaking for decades, each believing the other had betrayed them. Run into that a lot, actually. And it's heartbreaking.

And then it's, of course, heartbreaking if they're blessed to have a reconciliation, but how come it lasts for decades? One woman described an experience at a hospice that I thought was very powerful. She was keeping company with a woman who had cancer, tumor on her tongue, but she loved to talk and she wanted to have conversation, she talked some. They spent some time together and then when this woman came back a few days later to visit with the patient, the patient was sitting on the edge of her bed dressed about to go home and here's what had happened. A few nights before she had the worst nightmare of her life and

she dreamed that the staff at the hospice told her that she was next in line to die. and she woke up at 4 a.m., totally paralyzed with fear saying, you know, oh, no, God, why? And she was flooded with a sense of separation, not only from God, but from her husband, because of all the resentment she had been carrying and expressing through the years. You know, ever since bringing up their children, he was never doing enough. She had this flash of realization that it's not my time. I need to speak and I need to let him know I love him. and her tumor shrunk.

And she could leave, and she did leave. She had enough time to go home and speak from her true self, and then when she returned to the hospice, she died quite peacefully. To live inside the belief that either I am bad and wrong or you're bad and wrong is suffering. We're believing something not true. It's not our fault we're believing it.

It's deep in our wiring. But it's suffering. When it shapes our whole sense of self, it's what Heldegaard de Gingen called an interpreted world, that we're living in an interpreted world. In other words, rather than directly contacting each other and directly feeling our heart and directly responding to the life around, we're living with a lens, an interpretive lens that separates.

us. And here's what she says. She says, an interpreted world is not a home. If we're living in our beliefs of you're wrong, I'm wrong, you're bad, I'm bad, we're living in an interpreted world that's not a home. So why not? Why isn't it a home? There's a fundamental understanding as we begin to look at the reality we're living in that is really how much, it's really helpful. The phrase that I've most liked that frames this comes from one of my Tibetan teachers, Sokne Rimbusha, and it's real but not true. And if it's something you've heard before, you can keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into having it helped to disassemble a solid and delusionary reality, real but not true. And what it means is that that

that when we have these thoughts and beliefs, like Maria thought, hey, he's getting away with something, he wasn't really working out, or when she has the belief, hey, I'm falling behind, what's going on? When we have a belief then some way makes us less than or somebody else less than. It's a real belief, there's real thoughts going on and there's a real biochemistry that accompanies it, so it's real. But it's a representation in our mind. It's not the actual reality.

It's not the actual reality. It's not the experience of this living moment. And the easiest way to consider it is no belief or thought is reality. It's a soundbite going on. It's like an audio soundbite. It's an image in your mind. It's representational. It's like the map is not the territory.

Thoughts are not reality. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't need thoughts. I mean, what makes humans so successful is that we do have this capacity to represent reality and have it guide us. And so sometimes it's really useful. But to know that thoughts are not the living reality helps us to make our home in this living flow, in this tender heart space. The only real wisdom comes and we're directly intimate.

engaged with the moment. So we need thoughts. We need these representations. We need this map. Sometimes the map in our mind leads us towards more skill, more health, more happiness, more spiritual awakening.

And we have thoughts in our mind that are really conducive to creating an atmosphere for spiritual awakening. So they're really helpful. And then at other times we have representations that are really poor maps. Example, there's a magician working on a cruise ship, and he has a parrot that's always ruining his act, saying, in the middle of the trick,

the card's up a sleeve, or he has a dove in his pocket, or he slipped it through the hole in his hat. So one day, the ship they were performing on sank, and the parrot and the magician found themselves together in a life raft, and for several days the parrot sat silent and stared at the magician. On the fourth day, the parrot said, said, okay, I give up, what did you do with the ship? So we have maps in our mind and we're believing them and some maps trigger a sense of separation

and fear and emotional pain. If we can remember the map is not the territory, we begin to have some choice about how much we're going to pay attention to it. Does that make sense? Let's keep going, we'll explore it. I'll give you two examples. So one is the representation on our mind, here's a thought. When I'm angry and critical, my partner gets defensive and can't hear my message.

Useful thought. It's not truth, the living truth, but it's a very good representation. It's a really helpful one. Still remember, it's a thought, an image, a sound bite. But it's useful. Thought number two. When I'm angry and critical, it proves that I'm a bad person that I'll never change. and I'll always drive people away.

Useful or not useful? Right? So, in conventional reality, some representations are trustworthy predictors, but they're still not real, there's still just a notion. I remember very distinctly when my father was dying, I would have a few little blips of thoughts about the future

and even notions about what were happening. and immediately the sense of none of this matters or as meaningful. It was so clear that it was just an idea because all that mattered was the living presence right here, the sense of tenderness, the sense of utterly being right in that flow with him. It gets to be so poignant when we're in a situation that really matters how our ideas can take us away. They can create a world of distance.

I mean, every one of us has had the experience of dreaming and feeling the realness of it, sweating or crying or being totally afraid or whatever, and then waking up, and it takes a little while because there's still some part of us thinks maybe we're in the dream still, but we do catch on, oh, that was a dream. you can catch on exactly as vividly and fully that the thoughts and beliefs you're having are a dream.

They're a virtual reality. They're not truth. That's what's possible. So that leads us to how do we begin to really do that? How do we begin to look at where our lives have been limited? Our relationships haven't been as intimate as they could be. Our creativity's been kind of bad. How do we begin to look at the beliefs that are kind of holding us in and loosen them? And I'll bring in right now Srinar-Sar Gadato, one teacher who puts it, I think, the most succinctly,

which is, illusion exists because it's not investigated. You know, that in the moments that we say, oh, let's really look at this, then we begin to put a wedge in there where some light can shine through. Just even saying real but not true and in those moments feeling like, and it feels totally true. It doesn't matter. It's still a wedge. Okay, so there's two different, two interwoven ways of paying attention that begin to clear away the illusion of our beliefs, that begin to loosen the grip.

And by that I mean we're not so believing in it. The thoughts might still come, the feelings still come. We just don't believe it as much. I still regularly have thoughts and feelings of falling short, like really regularly. And the difference between me now and 10 years ago and then 10 years before that is I just don't believe them. There's some witnessing or awareness that my being is resting in that is recognizing it's going on. It doesn't feel good, I just don't believe it.

It's real but not true. With that comes a lot more compassion too of course and that's where we're going to be going. So there's two interwoven elements that help to loosen the grip and one is inquiry where we're actually saying okay what's really going on here? We're bringing our interest. It's like bringing the attentive laser-like quality of the mind to really look, penetrate. And the other is a quality of the mind. a quality of full embodied presence, mindfulness.

So we're going to look at some of the questions, the inquiry we can ask that starts, this right now got the idea of Ghostbusters, but starts, you know, in some way taking these illusions and disempowering them. Some of the questions and I think one of the leaders in the field is Byron Katie in terms of the kind of questions that she suggests in being able to see people. the limiting belief. So we'll use a mix, some of them from Katie Byron, some of them that I found are useful as we start looking at this and then I'll give you a chance to practice with yourself. And just to say that in each step that we're going to explore where we're kind of asking a question

and holding presence to what's there, you'll notice that the whole idea is that there's less and less of the self inside the dream or the belief and more and more resting in a larger space. And that is the key, that shift in identity is the key to freedom. You know, either you're identified in believing the belief or you're the ocean that's seeing the waves but you're not identified exclusively with any set of them. So we find we're in a conflict, okay, with ourselves, with another and we've already explored the first question. Okay, so what am I believing right now? You need to recognize there's a belief going on.

And most of us have these limiting fear of beliefs that usually have to do with their own failings. Like I mentioned for myself, when I'm struggling or not... There's some sense of I'm falling short. I won't be prepared. I'll let people down, that genre. So that on some level you're recognizing, okay, a belief is going on.

But it could be a belief about other people. Many people project the beliefs outward. The second step is the simple question, is this true? Or you might prefer, is it possible that this is real but not true? Which I think is a helpful frame. And just by asking that, just by saying is this true, even if your answer is yes, you're still opening to a possibility that's bigger than where you were. You're a little bit enlarging the space or field that you're occupying. You're just on some level remembering, hey, this

could be a representation and a representation that's not really serving. Okay, so the first question, what am I believing and then just being present with whatever? Second question, is this true or is this real but not true? The third question that I think is really, really valuable is, well, what's it like to live with this belief? What's the impact of this? Can we honestly look at, okay, so this is the belief that's here, well, how is it affecting my life? When I'm following this map, when I'm being guided by this map, what's it like? And so often we'll find right away that when we're being guided by that particular map,

what's going on is that we're in a very squeezed, tight, in prison place. that begins to, just asking that question and sensing our suffering begins to open us to compassion. Again, it's a question and a quality of presence that opens us bigger than the self that's believing in a limiting thought. Next question after that, because we'll start feeling the vulnerability under the belief, what does this place in me really need? We've been just believing a belief, well, what would really, what would really be? bring some healing. Again, when we ask that question, there's a natural tendency to want to offer some compassion, opens us up some. And then we can begin to rest in a larger place

and sense, well, what would my life be like if I wasn't living inside this map, if I wasn't being guided by this map? And we begin to sense a larger possibility that calls our heart and our soul towards our own natural awakening. So I'm going to give you a story of one of my own processes through these questions just to give you a little bit more of a sense of how it's worked and this isn't one of the stories of well back when I was 22 years old. This is not that long ago. So, background of the story is that my parents were very, very politically active.

And my father did civil rights law, among other law, very involved with poverty and economic justice. And I was more active when I was younger, but then I moved into an ashram and I went into, you know, the consciousness business. And so I had some guilt, though, that I wasn't continuing to be outwardly so active. And I made some peace with it. I kept saying, well, this is the inner dimension, be the change you want to create, as Gandhi put it. And this is what fits for me, I can only do so much. Well, about eight years ago, that sense of not enough, I'm not doing enough, really started

spiking, started coming up again, because our organization here, the Insight Meditation community of Washington was starting to very directly confront our needs to become a more inclusive and diverse community. And it was very close to my heart because I had both among my teaching friends and local friends, many people of color that were hitting all the walls of our Buddhist communities that were just not awake. Feelings of really how we were not inclusive and how we didn't have a genuinely welcoming Sanga and how we just weren't attuned to so many ways of our own implicitly. and bias. So as a board we were trying to start opening up the possibilities of, well, how can

we do trainings and how can we bring trainings to our community and so on? And what was coming up for me was a sense of real deep deficiency and shame that I wasn't doing more. I was whatever I was tied up and I kept thinking I need to put more time into this and I kept feeling a sense of this belief that I was failing. because I'm the leader in the community and therefore I should be the one to be more active. So that was the belief. I named the belief, okay falling short, very familiar belief, good to say, okay this is a belief. And then I said, well is it possible that this is real but not true?

And I said okay, it's real. I have all these beliefs about my own privilege and feeling guilty and not acting enough. it's not ultimate truth, it's an idea, it's a map, okay, number three, how is it affecting me to have this belief? Now, what I'm talking about is named now in the collective as white, guilt, but for me personally, what it felt like to live with that map was a sense of shame. And when I really let the belief be there and I felt my whole body, it was a very much broader narrative of not enough, this kind of hollow ache and a sense of pulling away from life, a sense of badness that I could, if I was, you know, if anybody was really near me and saw

it, they wouldn't like to be around me. And so I started really sensing how my white guilt was getting in the way of the very relationships I wanted to deepen and the people I wanted to work with more. And it was very poignant to sense the power of the belief to create so much suffering. It's like the very thing I was wanting was more connection and it was creating more distance. So, in those moments

I started getting compassionate. In those moments of seeing the effect of believing I was falling short was actually doing the opposite of what I wanted was when I could start and I put my hand on my heart as a gesture saying, okay, just be kind.

Just be kind. And when I said, you know, what is this place in me that feels so bad need, it needed in some way to trust myself, to trust the purity of my heart. That was the turning point. When I could say, well, the depth of my heart wants to serve connection in my life and in other people's lives. I want to wake up out of implicit bias. I want us all to wake up in a way that we can begin to heal the horror of racism.

When I could sense this is pure intention, that was very, very healing and allowed me to sense, well, what would it be like if I didn't move around feeling like I'm not enough and not doing enough for the board, for the community and so on? And immediately I got much, much more curious seeking to understand how the separations are happening, seeking to, you know, for more diversity in my own life, seeking really, just like really interested in what could really heal in our community and in the national community. All that guilt was like dampening down my curiosity and actually my energy. So I came to realize because this led to, we had some collective processes, a white,

awake year-long group that I was part of where we were all investigating our bias. I came, that's where I discovered, this is not my guilt, it's the guilt, which of course is very, very helpful. But I wanted to share this because this has been a kind of lifelong tangle for me of feeling I should be doing more. And it was so clear that challenging that belief actually allowed me to be more creative in serving, but from more of a heart place and less of a guilt place. But I had to ask those initial questions, what am I believing? Is it possible this is real but not true? I want to say at this point that it's not a one-shot, that we can do that kind of unraveling of a belief that's holding us in prison and then find a couple of days later

that we're just locked up in the same feelings and you just run it again. But each time you challenge a belief, there's more of who you are resting in a larger space and less of you believing it, which is why I can say, I don't really believe it when it comes up. And there's very little suffering around these beliefs. But I think it's important as we look to undoing beliefs

that we ask the question, what stops us from letting go? because we hold onto these beliefs really, really strongly. And I'd like to just suggest that we would rather be certain. We'd rather be certain and write about something than uncertain, even if what we're certain is that we're messing up, that we're a failure and we're unlovable. It's safer to be in that role than in that uncertainty of not knowing.

And similarly with other people, it gives us a feeling of being in control. If we say you're wrong, we're in control. A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales and the teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it was a very large mammal, its throat was very small.

And little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. So irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale couldn't swallow a human. It's physically impossible. And so the little girl said, well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher said, well, what if Jonah went to hell? And a little girl replied, then you ask them.

We hold tight to our beliefs. We want to be right, even when it feels terrible in some ways. And I want to say also that the more wounding and fear there is, the tighter we hold to our beliefs as a navigational tool. We're holding tight to the map. And you can see it in our collective psyche, how through history leaders have moved. mobilize people by fueling their fear and creating bad other.

That's the only way to get people to kill each other, really. Our life experience is shaped by our beliefs. It guides our actions. And so if you believe your worth is based on what you achieve, if you believe the only be loved, if you look a certain way or that others won't respect you unless you hide your vulnerability or any of these kind of beliefs, you've been organizing around that for a long time and it's very tightly held

and it keeps on creating your sense of your identity when you let go of those and this is what's so interesting on the spiritual path it's like being on a trapee going from trapeze bar to trapeze bar when you're in mid-air it's hairy right because you're not in a new set of beliefs

or you're nowhere well it's almost like that's what we have to be willing to do to not know, to say real but not true, and not hold on to a solid grounds to stay open. But what happens is for most of us as we begin, we're beginning to practice more and more mindfulness. There's more and more of us that gets that we're not free if we're believing something limiting and that there's this longing to be awake and a longing to wake. and a longing to wake up out of that ignorant fist that's twisting and pinching our secret cell. So we start looking at the beliefs that separate.

You're wrong, I'm wrong, the beliefs of personal failure. There really is a pure heart in us that does not want to be bound by these beliefs. I mentioned that our most deeply experienced belief is that we're separate. And I wanted to, as part of closing, read, this is Jonathan Livingston, who's a Harvard graduating from Harvard at the educational school. And this is a commencement talk that he gave and kind of went viral. And I found it so powerful that I wanted to share it with you. So Jonathan's African-American dedicated to really being free from that ignorant fist. and it's in that spirit I share with you

just a part of what he spoke at that commencement speech. He says, Today, when I look my students in the eye, all I see are constellations. If you take the time to connect the dots, you can plot the true shape of their genius, shining in their darkest hour. I look each of my students in the eyes

and see the same light that aligned Orion's belt. I see the same twinkle that God, I see them. Beneath their mass and mischief exists an authentic frustration and enslavement to your standardized assessments. At the core, none of us were meant to be common. We were born to be comets, darting across space and time. And injustice is telling them there are stars without acknowledging night that surrounds them. And justice is telling them education is the key while you continue to change the locks. Education is no equalizer. Rather, it is asleep that precedes the American dream.

So wake up, wake up. Lift your voices until you've patched every hole in a child's broken sky. Wake up every child so they know of their celestial potential. I've been a black hole in the classroom for far too long, absorbing everything without allowing my light escape. But those days are done. I belong among the stars. And so do you, and so do they.

Together we can inspire galaxies of greatness for generations to come. No, sky is not the limit. It is only the beginning. Lift off. To me that captures the same spirit that we hear in Rumi, but on a collective level to rake up out of the beliefs that keep us small. So we'll close with a little bit of a practice where you get to bring this to wherever you're feeling,

your beliefs are not serving. And take a few moments to allow yourself to settle, to feel your body and your breath, feel your intention that we might remove the veils that cover what's right here, the beliefs that create a barrier between ourselves and loving fully. Just feel the sincerity of that intention.

And you might bring to mind, as I bribed you two earlier, some situation in your life that gets you very reactive where you feel stuck, perhaps some conflict or some distance with one person perhaps, sensing when you're triggered, when you're feeling that distance, that conflict, the separation, sense what you're believing. Again, just ask yourself, what am I believing?

About myself or about the other, what does it mean to me if that person's treating me in this way? What are you believing? Belief might land on that person's bad or wrong, might also land on I'm not lovable, I'm not worthy. And don't worry if you're not sure because this is a practice you can, it's a life-fractor, practice really and we're just getting a taste here, you can revisit it. But just to sense if you're believing in some way that you're failing or the other person

is, and ask yourself that question, that simple question, is it true? Is it possible to sense that it's real but not true? Is it possible to sense it as a map or representation that's probably been there a long time conditioned by the culture and by our personal history, and ask yourself the question, what's it like to live with this belief? And this is the map that's guiding you. I'm bad, you're bad, you shouldn't, I'm failing.

What's it like? What's it like in your body, in your heart, when you're living with this? Can you sense the pain of the belief? You might sense how long you've been living with this belief. how familiar it is and how it's really affected your life over years and years. Just let your heart witness that. And you might ask, so what does the hurting place inside me, the vulnerable place most need right now? Just in a very genuine way, just listen in, just sense underneath that belief there's vulnerability.

What does that place need? And you might put your hand on your heart or your hand on your cheek. as a way of communicating and being with yourself and sense if there's any words, any message, any reminder that in some way would be healing for the part of you underneath that vulnerability underneath the belief, the fear place, the hurting place. What does it need? It could be just simply a message of I'm here, I care, I'm sorry and I love you. you, you can trust, trust your goodness, see if you can just let in the compassion and the care. And since that you're inhabiting that place of compassion, that awareness that's tender and

from that vantage point you might ask, well what would my life be like without this belief? What would it be like? Who would I be without this belief? If you no longer believe this, if this map was no longer shaping your life, what would your whole sense of your own being be like? Can you get just a glimmer and then let go and relax in that space? Illusion only exists because it's not investigated. We close as we opened with the words of Rumi-A.

I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money, to climb over the fence and take my own vegetables. But no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I'm the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. Thank you for your attention. Namaste. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.