Tara Brach - Realizing Our Undefended and Awakened Heart (retreat talk)

Episode Date: September 23, 2016

Realizing Our Undefended and Awakened Heart (retreat talk) - It is our evolutionary and spiritual potential to release unnecessary habits of violating other tribes, individuals and unwanted parts of our own being. This talk explores three essential facets of the pathway to awakening: Leaving the fortress of aversive judgment, entering the wilderness of our embodied being and encircling this life with love. 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. Tonight's talk, the theme, will be about how the arising of judgment, a verse of judgment, can be an incredibly powerful portal to the awakened heart when we have that intention. And I'd like to begin with a story I heard about Andre Scareg Gregory, who many of you've heard of my dinner with Andre. A man asked him about his writing,

and how did it have so much juice? And his response was he told a story about when his wife had gone to the hospital, was going to go in for surgery, went under anesthesia, and he realized belatedly that he hadn't said to her what he needed to say before she went under. And he made a commitment that when she woke up, that he was going to speak his heart as if for the last time. And he said, write like that. This is the last time you're ever going to write. Speak like that. Live like that. And there's this really powerful message of what it means to remember what matters and the more moments we

remember, the more our life is really aligned with our hearts. And this is the intention behind Bodhita. Bodhita, I love the sound of the word because it's kind of bright and it's the awakened heart mind. It's the wisdom that realizes the truth of who we are. and it's that heart's expression of that, the tenderness and warmth and radiance that comes with that. And I think the teaching is that each of us has this deep longing to live aligned with our hearts, and we suffer when we feel that we're not aligned, when we're not living according to or true to who we can be. And I often refer to this palliative caregiver who had been with thousands of people when they were dying, kept them company, and said that the greatest regret of the dying is that simple sense of I didn't live true to myself.

That I lived according to others' expectations. I lived according to my internalized should, but I didn't live really true to my heart, true to Bodichita, although that's not the word they use. But you can get the sense that that's the suffering, and it's not just with people who are dying. I would say that most people I encounter who are depressed are depressed because there's some sense of deep discouragement

at ever really living the life that's aligned. Somebody saw on the beltway in Washington a bumper sticker and said if you lived in your heart you'd be home right now and we know when we're honest how many moments of each day

that we are leaving we leave ourselves I'd say that's the main reason we come to a retreat so that we can a little bit less believing ourselves, break that habit some. John O'Donohue died about eight years ago, poet and writer. He said that we're so busy managing our life so as to cover over this great mystery that we're involved with. And I think we can feel that. Sometimes when we get here and we start slowing down, we start getting how much we miss.

As I said the other day, it's like for me, you know, if I slow down kind of at a half speed, I take in twice as much. So we're preoccupied. We get busy. We leave ourselves. And of course, we're not alone. And I love the way Pat brought in this evolutionary perspective that, you know, all creatures are busy managing their lives.

Like really, really busy. because underneath that there's this very primal, very universal experience of vulnerability. There's this perception that this being, this separate formation that's emerged is temporary and its business is to keep on going for a while. So every one of us is busy in that way, managing our lives. And in the process, when we get really, really involved with it and go on overdrive with it, we lose sight of the mystery. So one of the understandings that's coming out more and more in evolutionary science

is that our deepest wiring is around avoiding harm, more than seeking pleasure, more than attaching, that most of our brain is recording things in order to help us to avoid having trouble, avoid harm. And there's an understanding, and this relates to a question that came up this morning, a very good question about how come we get so fixated on the negative emotions? And we have a negativity bias. They say that our brains are velcro for bad. stuff and Teflon, Teflon for all the good stuff. And that actually the brain is

designed to put a lot of energy into processing painful experiences and does not process and retain. Doesn't get such a trace in the brain for the pleasant stuff. Okay? So we have this bias and it comes from hundreds of thousands of years of needing to have that bias. We were in a lot of physical danger. We were kibbles for a lot of other creatures, you know. So we're designed to keep that imprint of when we're endangered so we can take care of ourselves. But the deal is, as we know, that especially in the last 6,000 years or so, we don't need that bias anymore in the same way. We're not under those physical threats, but our bodies have not caught up. Okay, so we still

have that bias. And you can see it in daily life. Especially the more traumatized we are in our personal lives, the more that negativity bias holds. So we can see it in our daily life. I mean, I can speak for myself. There's that sense of getting through the day, you know, as if there's these landmines. The landmines are just my own emotions kind of popping off. You can see how much we're going through the day in some way trying to figure something out, you know, the sense like we're always trying to work out something,

and that around the corner there's that sense that something's going to go wrong. So it's like we're stealing ourselves. Chogh Mtronkva said it's like we're a bunch of tense muscles, like tensing against our existence. So it's a deep conditioning to perceive danger, to assume something's wrong, and to set in motion this kind of chain of reactions, to try to protect ourselves. It's deep in our body minds, and you can see it at retreat.

I mean, here we are. We're not particularly physically endangered. Even emotionally, there's a kind of, we're not as much in interaction, so some of the threats that come up, being in social engagement, aren't there. And yet you can sense how the mind will take whatever it can and just land on it and keep harping on it. Maybe you have an interview coming up and you start fixating on how you feel about going into a group interview. Or it might be that there's some physical pain and then it's, is it going to get worse?

And the mind just gets riveted on it. Or it might be that the mind keeps going to some situation in your life that's difficult. But that's the tendency. The tendency is to think that if we start relaxing, start having more enjoyment, that in a way we're going to get slammed from the side unexpectedly, so we better keep vigilant.

And then there's a more subtle level of having a problem, which is, I might not be doing the retreat right or a meditation right. There's such a sense that it should be different. Track that one. how many moments are some notion that what you're experiencing right now, this emotion, this way of thinking, this way of paying attention, should be better, should be more, should be quieter. So what we do most of the time is we're in a process of assuming something needs to be different and trying to fix it, rather than just a experiencing the vulnerability that's there. We are continuously leaving vulnerability. We'll do anything, anything that we can, any strategy, but just plain sit down in it. So that reminded me

of a story I heard about a student who went to her young professor's office and she kind of glanced down the hall and then she went to the room, closed the door and she kind of kneels pleadingly in front of him. She said, I would do anything to pass this again. exam. She leans closer to him. She kind of flips her hair and she really is gazing deeply into his eyes. She says, I mean, and she whispers it, I would do anything. He returns her gaze. Anything? Anything. He says it again, anything? Anything. And then his voice turns to a whisper. He says, would you study? So we'll do anything, but actually get down to being with a, the uncomfortability. If we can get away with it, we keep doing that. And the deal is that when

we leave the vulnerability that's here, we're leaving our embodied presence, and we're leaving the one gateway to Bodhita. I'm just going to say that again, when you leave vulnerability, you leave your body. And if you're not in your body, you've left the one place that you can experience that awakening and freeing of the heart. If you leave, basically Bodhita's covered over. Kabir writes, Inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

The God whom I love is inside. So this is our conundrum that we have this deep conditioning, As Pat described, this limbic love, we're trying to save ourselves, but we're saving ourselves by leaving. And we're leaving the one place where we can discover the God and the goodness and the sacredness that we most yearn for. So the beginning is to sense that it's part of our evolutionary story to leave. It's part of the design. It's not something wrong. and if we hold that as something wrong we just deepen the leaving.

We're designed to feel vulnerable and then go into fight-flight-freeze into our different versions of exiting. And that's not the end of the evolutionary story. We also have the potential to realize that and to sense the suffering. Really, the suffering is it's getting between us and loving. We feel that suffering, and that suffering calls us to deepen our attention and learn to stay.

So I'm hoping you get that that's somewhat a simple frame. And the beginning is just starting to realize as we're here, we're watching how we leave home. We're recognizing it. We're recognizing how spontaneously the mind will recognize, oh, okay, I've been often thought. The self doesn't have to realize anything. awareness realizes we've left.

It just happens. So we start noticing that, and there's all sorts of ways that we know we leave, but one of the big ones, and the one I want to now drill down into a little more, is we leave by judging what's going on. And it can be very, very subtle, and we can miss it,

which is why I want to spend the rest of the evening on it, which is in any moment when there's some overlay that what's happening right now shouldn't be happening. Shouldn't, the word shouldn't, big flag. That this is wrong in some way, this is bad, and it's usually in the form of I'm wrong and bad or you're wrong and bad. And either one of those can be a domain you can explore

as I continue to speak. Now, just to discriminate, there's wise discrimination, which is, and I'll give you an example, Let's say I see my mind obsessing over and over again about something that I'm wanting. And I could say with wise discrimination, oh, that obsessing is taking me from the moment, and I know that it's easier to be exploring that, you know, going into my mind to this trip that I'm going on in the future than hanging out with this backache. Now which would are, where do I want to be in Hawaii, you know, in Hawaii or with this backache?

So I can see with wise discrimination, yes, that would be the case, but ultimately there's a lot more freedom through this embodiment. And that's wise discrimination. But if I start saying, I'm a bad meditator, I'm blowing it, I'm wasting my time at retreat, I can't believe after 30 years I am still leaning forward like, okay, so that's a verse of judgment. Okay, you get the difference? Okay.

So we leave home when there's an unpleasantness that we experience, the vulnerability, and and then it's part of our conditioning to blame. Now, just like everything else, that has its origins in our evolutionary history that we would do that, but when we do it, when we experience it, we're running away from vulnerability. So let's just check it out for a moment

because I'm going to ask you to explore something in your life, someplace where you might get stuck in averse of judgment. And if you don't have a place in your life, let's see, what's the if, what's the then? Just a big namaste and bow. But for now, you might just close your eyes and pause for a moment and just check in. And just sense for yourself if there's anywhere that you're aware of now, that you're somewhat hooked on sending blame. And it could be that it's aimed at another person in your life,

or it could be towards yourself, where you have a story of something's wrong, or that story in some ways making the other person less, there's some diminishing, or you're making a part of yourself less. Take some moments to let yourself really get that in mind so that you can feel the charge, what it is that makes you feel

that something's wrong. And if you had to let go of the narrative that something's wrong, that this is bad, that the other person's wrong or bad, or that you are, if you had to let go of that, if you had to kind of drop out of that storyline, what would you have to experience underneath it? What's the feelings? If you had to let go of the blaming, what would you have to sit down into that might feel difficult. What's underneath the blaming? What's the feeling tone in the body? You can open your eyes. I'd like to just ask just to hear a few words in the room. You just kind of raise your hand and I'll point of what's underneath blame for you. Just a word. Anybody wants to, yeah. Fear. Shame, yes. Guilt. Yeah. Control. Yep.

Sadness, yeah. Disappointment. Okay. So you get the sense there's all the flavors of vulnerability in there. Just different flavors. That it's easier to stay in blame than it is to go into the rawness of feeling. Now that is again, it's not our fault because we are rigged to do that. Another evolution story, a little girl asked her mother, how did the human race appear. And the mother answered, well, God made Adam and Eve. They had children. So that's how all mankind was made. Two days later, the girl asked her father the same question. The father answered, many years ago, there were monkeys from which human race evolved. The confused girl returned to her mother and said, Mom, how is it possible you told me the human race was created by God? And dad said they were developed from monkeys. And the mother answered, well, dear, it's very simple. I told you about my side of the family. and your father told you about his.

Okay, so we'll keep on with the evolutionary story. So again, over the hundreds of thousands of years, averse of judgment became a neural trait, and it became a trait for very good survival reasons, which was tribes were small, they live far from each other, but they were aggressive towards each other, humans, little tribes, so it became very critical for survival to know who,

who the bad other was. You needed to know. You need to know, I'm this tribe, that's that tribe, I'd be careful around that tribe. So, aversive judgment towards the other. In a very diminishing way, there's the stories about epitaphs where tribes had names for themselves that had things to do with human or belonging or of the people. But when they'd refer to other tribes, they'd have really demeaning terms like the Eskimos were called those that eat raw meat or something like that, putting down the other. So that was built into the psyche for hundreds of thousands of years. And not only that, within a tribe, the ways the tribes really made it, the reason humans were able to become stronger on the planet

than other species was collaboration, cooperation, pro-social behavior. So judgment within the tribe was used. If somebody wasn't cooperating with the well and the needs of the whole group, they got judged adversively and there was great power to it because what was the result of that? Banishment. So in our psyche's judgment is linked to banishment. It's not like, oh, I'm sensitive to criticism. It's, oh, I don't like the feeling that I'm going to be completely deserted and abandoned and left out in the cold, right? This is in our psyches for hundreds of thousands of years. I just want to kind of give it a, the view of time.

So what happens in the last 6,000 years is that we went from more of a tribal psyche to an individual egoic psyche, but kept on having the judgment cooking as a management strategy. Bad others, bad other individuals, and also bad others from other places, other ethnicities, other races, other people with different people with different people. religions and we got really good at bad other meaning the other parts of ourselves that we don't like so we try to control the inner tribe you know we're we all have multiple personalities in some way you know we've got all these parts and

we have parts we don't like and we're trying to control them so we can be you know a successful entity does that make sense as a way to okay so this is rigged in really deeply the only problem with it is We can get away with shoulds and judgment on the small stuff. We can manage ourselves and others on small things. It doesn't make for good feelings, but it can look from the surface like it's working. But on any of the deep difficulties, we cannot change ourselves, transform with a verse of judgment. Anyone who's struggling with a major addiction, anyone who's struggling with major shame or grief

or anger or anything, you're not going to be able to judge your way out of it to behave well. We know that. We can't, if we say, well, I hate myself for overeating. I hate myself so much, I'm so disgusted myself, I'm going to start eating right. It doesn't work, right? I mean, I'm sure there's at least 85% of us that know that one in this room. I hate myself for getting insecure with other people. You cannot make yourself change from hating yourself.

Hatred doesn't do it. I hate myself for being needy. So the behaviors that come out of self-hatred only make it worse. And I don't think I need to convince you of that. I think that's something we really get. I like the way, though, that Dave Berry put it. He has a piece on guys working out. He describes being puny all his life, and he hated himself for it.

He said it was ultimate pain for a male. He said, I totally missed the boat to Puberty Island. He said, I was this hairless little dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range. One day my mom, bless her heart, had to talk with me. She told me that girls were not interested only in looks, that the qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor. That little talk was long ago, but it taught me an invaluable life lesson. I've never forgotten.

Moms lie when they have to. He describes the ongoing suffering of not meeting the much-he's most standards for males, you know, and how much he couldn't stand himself for it. He says, men, you know how when your wife can't open a pickle jar, she gives it to you, and you're supposed to smile in a manly, patronizing ways, you effortlessly twist it open? That's not what happens in our house. he says what happens is after a grim struggle lasting several minutes I wind up lying on the kitchen floor exhausted and whimpering

while the pickle jar unopened laughs and flirts boldly with my wife have you ever seen a pickle jar flirt so the deal is if you watch what's going on in our brain when we go into self-aversion in a very direct way when the limbic system hijacks things, we get worse because it cuts off the frontal cortex, which is the domain that gives us perspective, it gives us humor, it gives us mindfulness, it gives us compassion. We get cut off from all our resources when we get caught up in self-aversion. So what about judging others? Does that work? We know it doesn't, but I'll go through my

rigmarole on it anyway. I mean, we know what it's like to be the recipient of judgment. and criticism and it makes us defensive. When we approach another person and they experience in some way us saying you're wrong or bad for how you are, it has to have them pull in and create, it has to create distance. It just does. Do they cooperate? Sometimes maybe if they're scared enough but it doesn't help in the long run and often it doesn't help at all. One young girl had noticed that her mother had several strands of white hair coming in her brunette hair and so she inquisitively asked mom why are some of your hair turning white and her mother replied well every time you do something wrong and

make me cry or feel unhappy one of my hair turns white little girl thought by the about this revelation for a while and she said mom how come all of grandma's hairs are white. So bottom line is that this habit that we are this trait that we've carried forward in an evolutionary sense of making ourselves and others wrong or bad is not only not effective, it creates distance. And on the spiritual path it's kind of a developmental arrest in the sense that we're stuck doing something that was stage appropriate at another time in history but it doesn't enable us to keep on waking up

it doesn't enable us to open to bodiceita to this this heart that really longs to love without holding back and to be able to receive love judgment keeps us from that and as many of you have been hearing about there's this term that neurons that fire to wire together, that the more we practice something, the more it gets kind of grooved into our brain? Well, every time we judge, we're participating in that so that the state of feeling aversive and judgmental becomes a trait. We are contributing to that. John O'Donohue again.

He said, what has happened to our wildness? Talks about the wildness of God. what has happened to it and he describes this managing of our lives you know this this way that we manage and that we try to control things and tonight as we're talking about judging or blaming as really keeping us from our full aliveness so I'm describing it a bit as that the judgment separates and I wanted to share with you a story because it's sometimes very over how judgment leads to all war. But sometimes it's more subtle. I want to give you an example of more subtle. And this is Gregory Boyle. He wrote the book Tattoos on the Heart.

And I take a lot of stories from him. If you haven't read it, tattoos on the heart. It's just extraordinary. It's a beautiful book on compassion. It describes these youth in L.A. that are in street gangs and really the kind of the horror and the vines they live in and also the potential when given some containers and some opportunities. In this story he's talking about that he gets very busy on Saturday mornings because he has to do mass and then he has to meet with people afterwards and that he in this case has just a a short window of time between doing mass and having to do baptism, and he's trying to get through his mail to make sure that a certain letter hasn't come in when in his door barges

a woman named Carmen, and I'm going to read you from there. He says, Carmen is a heroin addict, a gang member, a street person, an occasional prostitute. She's often defiantly storming down the street, usually shouting at someone. She's a real grittonia, hollering at the men inside the bars, and so on. She comes into my room and says, I need help. She launches right in Brash and something of a no-shit sister. Oh, she says, I've been to like 50 rehabs. I'm known all over, nationwide. She smiles. Her eyes wander around my office and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitasked and her inspection of the place doesn't derail her stream of consciousness rambling. The family will

arrive for the baptism in five minutes. I went to Catholic school all my life, she says. fact I graduated from high school even, fact, right after graduations when I started to use heroin. Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point, and her speech slows to deliberate and halting. And I have been trying to stop since the moment I began. Then I watch as Carmen tilts her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling, and in an instant her eyes become these two ponds, water rising to meet their edges. swollen bank spilling over. Then, for the first time, really, she looks at me and straitens. I am a disgrace. Suddenly her shame meets mine. For when Carmen walked

through that door, I had mistaken her for an interruption. So we can begin to look at not the most overt but the subtle ways that we have, we think, we're on our way somewhere and our judgment is really don't get in my way. Do you know what I mean? And the word disgrace is what most struck me because it hit me for myself that when I am judging, I am no longer in the flow of grace, that we leave the flow of who we are in the moment of judging. attract, we become small. So maybe again a moment just to reflect if you will. And this, and this is just to be scanning again and just noticing where you sense averse of judgment keeps you from loving or being more fully alive from the flow of grace. Again, you

might choose to reflect on the same person or yourself. But this time just let yourself enter into the judge, the aversive judge. Just take a moment to investigate when you're viewing through that lens. When someone's let you down, someone has met your criteria, when somebody's hurt you when somebody's behaved in a terribly hurtful way because I'm not making this minimal when you've hurt yourself when you've behaved in ways that you feel sabotaged your own life and you start judging yourself but sit in the seat of the judge and just notice what the experience is like in your body your heart your mind notice who you are when you're the judge. What is your sense of your own being when you're inside that, that view and those feelings?

One of the Zen patriarchs talks about being without anxiety about imperfection. We might also think about anger about imperfection. I'd like to invite you just for a moment to check out for yourself, who would you be? if you let go, totally let go, just for these moments of a verse of judgment. Just sense if it dropped away, whether it's towards yourself or another, really, who would you be? And for some, maybe there's a glimmer of really resting in that openness, that tenderness that's no longer bound. for others you might have found another level of judgment

like blaming yourself for not being able to touch into that and just notice that because the seeing is part of the freeing and opening your eyes as you'd like so this last part of the exploration is really how this transformation happens from the egoic self that's caught in being the judgeer and the judged to Bodichita, which is that heart space where everything's welcome, that tenderness where we can love without holding back and where we really can let love in. And I'd like to divide it into three

domains of practice as we do this last piece. And I hope they'll sound very familiar. The language might not, but they are. The first domain is leaving the fortress of thinking. So the first that we wake up out of a verse of judgment. The first step is leaving the fortress of thinking, in other words, inviting ourselves out of our beliefs and narratives. The second piece is to enter the wilderness of the body, this clay body. Okay? Is that familiar so far, leaving the thoughts coming into the body? Or as Pat described last night, leaving the object and coming back to the experiencing? Same thing. Okay. The third part, encircle with love. fill with love, embrace with love, be love, three pieces.

I'm gonna say them again. That's what you wanted me to do? Leave the fortress of thoughts, enter the wilderness, and encircle with love. So we start with leaving the fortress and this is a lot of the training and leaving the fortress doesn't mean in some way going like this about thoughts, like bad. It just means recognizing them so we're not inside them. Okay? It means waking up to something larger.

which loosens the stickiness. And one of the best understandings in waking up out of thoughts is when we start getting, we don't have to believe them. Thoughts are sound bites and images, the representations, the thought of the apple,

that image you might have, anything you talk about about an apple is absolutely different than the feeling and the crunch and the swallowing. It can never be anything near it. It's just an idea. So if we can in some way remind us ourselves with thinking and with averse of thoughts, whatever the blaming is,

is it's real, it's a real thought, but it's not truth. Real but not true. This is a phrase from Sokney-Rimpichet that I have found incredibly helpful in my practice. That what's going on in these minds is real thoughts and real feelings, but it doesn't mean their truth of what's happening. So we watch it.

We watch how the body register. We have these thoughts about what's wrong with another person ourselves, and our body registers it, and if we're believing it, we're going to suffer. One of my favorite examples. A couple from Michigan decided to go to Florida that thaw out during a particularly icy winter, and they planned to stay at the very same hotel they had when they had honeymooned,

except for because of travel and traffic and this and that, their schedules. He had to go a day ahead. So he goes a day ahead, settles into the hotel, and decides to send an email to his wife. But he does one letter wrong in her name, and he doesn't realize the error, and he sends it out. So here's what happens. Somewhere in Houston, a woman was returning home from her husband's funeral. Now, he was a minister for many years, and he had been called home to glory, you know, because he had had a sudden heart attack. so she's checking her email expecting messages from relatives and friends and after reading the first message she faints so her son rushes into the room and here's what he sees on the computer

screen to my loving wife subject I've arrived date January 15th 2012 I know you're surprised to hear from me They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in. I see that everything's been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then. Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. sure is hot down here. So, now in that story, you'd think, well, that's really, that's not reality.

Of course, that's not reality. it's a confused email, but our thoughts about the future and our thoughts about each other and our thoughts about ourselves are as far from the living reality as anything else. When they're aversive, they're not only far from it, they create a tremendous amount of pain. So the first step is to say, okay, no matter how real this feels, it's not truth. and in that moment you're no longer sitting inside the thoughts

we're getting beyond them there's a Jewish parable that I really like where before an infant is born an angel of conception infuses that infant with all the wisdom the heart wisdom that child will need through his or her life

and then the angel puts her finger above the child's lips where that indentation is for most of us and says, shh. And there's a secret pact between the child and God.

And the story is that we all have this indentation on an upper lip. It's the angel's fingerprint. And it's basically saying that the wisdom's here, but it's only available in silence when we enter the silence. When we become still,

then we can listen and really hear the truth. We have to step out of our thoughts about things and enter reality. There was a friend of my sons who, early 20s, academically incredibly successful. He had his dream job. He was working for this international health service.

It's very rewarding in many ways. Thinking he wants to go into healing, he applies to medical school. And then he starts getting these anxiety attacks and panic attacks and tremendous amount of self-doubt and self-doubt. and self-judgment, where he had that sense. It wasn't like he was at the end of his life looking back with remorse, but this deep, deep fear that he wasn't living true to himself. And the shame about it, like in some way he was off track. And he wasn't sure what it was all about except for he had applied to Stanford Medical School he got in, and he basically said,

no, I'm not going to go. And instead, he started taking a course, a hospice training course. So here's this case, like in this dilemma, in the huge self-doubt, self-aversion, on the wrong, don't know what my path is, not aligned, says no to medical school. There he is in this hospice training course. Everybody else is over 60, and he's like 23. And three months later, he's diagnosed with a very rare bone cancer. This is just a year and a half ago this happened. didn't know if he'd make it through.

And so he had this year where instead of, you know, the plan enter, you know, this incredibly competitive school with, you know, his head going crazy, he was entering the wilderness in a way he hadn't bargained for, but it got very quiet. And he described, he had, it was a year of chemo, there was surgery, and I just want to say it seems he's in the clear. And I just met up with him a few months ago. I think he's going to be okay. But he described coming through that year and at the end feeling deeply aligned with himself and in touch with that small, still voice, really open-hearted. So I asked him what happened because I was

really interested in knowing. And he described it that he had a surrender all control. So the first time in his life, he absolutely couldn't think anything out. There was no nothing thinking could do that would work. He had to see that and let go of it. He couldn't figure anything out. He couldn't manage anything. He couldn't judge it. Nothing worked.

So he just had to kind of surrender it. Anything about his future, anything at all. And he said he just had to kind of let go into being with this ultimate vulnerability that was in there of live or not live. And he said in that surrendering, he found himself held in loving presence. And for the first time in his life,

he felt truly seen and held and resting in loving presence. This is the pathway to Bodhita. And I kind of step out of the fortress, come into the wilderness, and in some way there's a surrendering into this out of control, rawness, and realness, and in that, a discovery of,

of a loving and an awakeness that it's hard for us to imagine at times. So more about entering the wilderness since I feel like that's a lot of what goes on here in our practices where we're trying to kind of stay and stay with what's difficult. And one of the metaphors I like a lot is with kayaking in learning to kayak. You know there's one story told by Steve Flowers about a friend of his who is very athletic. got caught in a keeper's hole. And a keeper's hole is this kind of circulating water that anything gets caught

and it keeps spinning down and down and down. So if you tip over and get caught in a keeper's hole, you just get dragged down and the tendencies to fight it and you drown. So most of the drownings that happen in kayaking are because people get caught in these kind of circular currents. and so when this guy got caught he did just that he tried to swim against it and he started getting more and more exhausted until finally he took a deep breath and he just let himself

get carried down and he got carried down to the bottom and he popped up 20 yards out which is what happens if you don't fight the current and you let yourself go down and down so when we encounter vulnerability and fear if we fight it if we leave it we can leave it temporarily and feel better, but if we fight it and leave it, it's still there and ultimately there's more suffering. If and when we can take enough of a breath and just let ourselves go down and down and down, we discover a certain freedom that is what I'm describing as Bodhita. So I want to give you an example of working with a verse of judgment in this. one of my, in my own experience, that taught me a lot.

And so this took place, this was me and Jonathan, quite an averse of judgment. And I wish he was here because I feel a little bad that I'm telling the story without him, but I told him I was. And this took place way, way, way back in time when we were young and confused and so on. Like three weeks ago. So, and the setup is pretty straightforward that I was judging him for not responding the way I wanted him to, to something I was sharing with him. He wasn't as supportive and engaged as I wanted him to be.

And then he was judging me back for judging him aggressively. You know how that happens? You could judge for judging, and then you judge the person for judging, you for judging, and it keeps going. So it was one of those. So we talked, and we both know how to name things. So we did the nonviolent kind of naming where I said, well, when you did this and I described it just right, I didn't add on anything, I felt such and such and what I needed was such.

You know, I did it just right, and he mirrored me back just right. And then he did the same thing, well, when you did such and such and I mirrored. So we did it just right. And we still felt like shit. You know, we felt terrible. And so there was like zero empathy. We had done all the right moves. So what's wrong?

Okay. So our bodies were still in the limbic dance, basically. It's like we had gone through the motions, but the body was still holding. And at first I really made that wrong. Like, this is bad. We should both be in a better place until I got it that, okay, it just needs time. It's like this right now. So next day we're meditating together, and I get back into the blame,

and it just keeps. circling on how, yes, I was judging and yes, I was judging and yes, I was judging Grassley, but there was a really good reason. So I was going through that. And finally, that angel that says, I just, some part of me went, you know, stop. And it was not a mean stop. It was just stop, you know. It was so much pain in this looping. So it came into my body and realized underneath the anger, just the way I asked you earlier, you know, what's underneath the blame, I felt hurt.

No surprise, there was hurt. And I felt really hurt. And then I just kept going in and end, feeling it, and I got some kind of images from being young, and my father being preoccupied maybe, or who knows, but the young, and then even younger, there's some sense of who I am and what I'm being is not being received. I'm not, I'm not lovable.

and then this feeling, you know, grief with, oh, he'll leave because I'm not lovable. And then this feeling of, oh, I'm leaving because I'm not lovable. I'm not like him. So it went into that very core, not lovable place. And what I found, because this is basically the grieving was about separation. I'm not lovable. I'll be separate from him. I'm not lovable. I'm separate from myself.

Okay? That was the grief. And I found the deeper I went into the vulnerability in the grief, the more there was like, inside, embedded inside it, this very, almost excruciating tenderness and space. And if I went deeper and deeper, it became more and more just the space of loving. Inside the grieving was loving. But I had to let go, like the Keeper's Hole, had to go in and in and in. And as it turned out with us, that he had his own process of that unfolding. This is very much the tracing back the radiance,

the more you're with something with awareness, the more you become that loving awareness. Okay? That we were then able to name again the depth of the hurt, and as soon as somebody can name and be congruent as they're doing it, how deeply they're feeling, it all falls away. The barriers fall away. So my learnings, it takes.

time. We think things should be a certain way and it just takes time. That was learning number one. Learning number two is the intention, just come into this wilderness. And then learning number three was that if you go in and in and in, you come into Bodichita, that loving, awake heart. I love this from Rumi. Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are you've been stony for too many years try something different surrender so tonight we're really talking about the continuing process of evolution where we all get caught in that limbic dance in that chain of reactivity of this organism trying to survive and something in us is waking up to see that and recognize we have this potential if we can learn to stay.

If we can pause and instead of believing our thoughts, come back into the wilderness, that there's an opportunity to really wake up our hearts. Now, sometimes the process goes because that we come out of our thoughts and come into the wilderness and go in and in and in and in that presence, we discover that compassion and that tenderness. But at other times, there's the keepers hold of the fear, and going in and in it's too dangerous, it's not safe enough, and we need to in some way tap into the bodiceita,

get a taste of it enough to make it safe enough to go in. Does that make sense? That we need to on purpose sense some way to invoke some feeling of loving and belonging in order to then let go into the depth. So I want to end with a story that kind of speaks to that because it became so clear to me. I was at a one-month retreat. I was leading it, a phopassanate retreat, when one woman that I was working with, this African-American woman who was bringing with her a tremendous amount of sorrow about her life, and in particular a feeling of a feeling of failure.

And so one morning, we had done a lot of interviews because in a month retreat you get more interviews. So I got to know her pretty well. I'll tell you a little more about the background. But one morning she came in and she said to me, well, I went to church this morning. And I was surprised. I mean, I said, you did?

She goes, oh yeah, I went to church and we sang gospel. It was so rich, so beautiful. Oh, I needed that. So I'm thinking in my mind, this isn't really what we do on recharges. We don't leave the retreat, get in the car, going, you know, so on, the driveway and drive down the highway and all that. It wasn't the protocol. But, you know, I was, I'm a pragmatist.

I figure whatever works. So, you know, so, and in her last interview, she had been really distraught. She had really kind of, it was a kind of turning on yourself where it didn't matter what I would say on some level she had a reason that she was wrong and bad. And I figure everyone needs to find their own way. you know, so I asked her to tell me more about going to church. She said, oh, I was feeling that same fear and failure I told you about while I was at church. And then I started praying for love, and I started to pray to love myself. And I felt like I was wrapping Jesus like a shawl around me, and peace started filling my heart.

And the more I imagined I was wrapping Jesus like a shawl around me, the more my heart just filled up, and I haven't taken the shawl off. That loves warming me up. And it was with an inner jolt. I realized she had gone to church in a kind of metaphorical way. She hadn't really driven anywhere. It took me a while. But anyway, she continued.

She goes, and I'm wearing the shawl. Now when I walk those hills and when I sit my tea and standing in line at lunch, she gave me one of her mischievous grin. She goes, yep, Tara, even in the shower, I'm wearing that shawl. And we laughed. and she just told me that the shawl, feeling held in love, helped her to soften and feel enough belonging so she could begin to do what is really so the key point,

the key transformation point, in moving from that limbic dance to Bodhi Chita, which is to make this love of this life right here perfect. many of you'll remember the line from Srinar Sorgadata all I plead with you is this make love of yourself perfect deny yourself nothing and discover your beyond

so it's love of this life right here and I often use the gesture putting the palm on my heart or like this in some way we each need to find our pathway to holding this life as sacred as anything in the universe. Then naturally in the moment, once we've held this life as totally in love, once we're the holder in the held, it naturally ripples outward. So I started tonight with dinner with Andres and how he describes really,

live it like this is your last. If you're with yourself as you're dying, how would you want to be treating yourself with another? Can we step forward and be willing to just really be aligned with our hearts? And this process of leaving the fortress, like stepping outside of these thoughts that are real but not true, entering the wilderness, encircling with love. and what I'd like to do is just read you from Pema children

and then have you just do a brief reflection on this for yourself. She describes how our journey as frequently, it appears like we're climbing this mountain and we're trying to leave behind our attachments and our worldliness, and then on the peak we transcend all the pain. And she says, the problem with this metaphor is we're leaving behind all the others. Our schizophrenic sister, our tormented animals and friends, their suffering continues.

She says, the process of discovering Bodhi Chita, this awakened heart, the journey goes down, not up. It's as if the mountain pointed toward the center of earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering

of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We explore the reality of insecurity and pain without pushing it away. If it takes you, years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression,

we move down and down and down. And with us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom, we discover water, the healing water of Bodichita. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die. So let's just take a moment, if you will, again pausing. Just with some interest and gentleness, sensing again, if there's anywhere that there's some judging that you want to find some freedom around, evolve with more freedom in relating to,

judging towards another, judging towards yourself, and just to sense the possibility of recognizing the thoughts of the judgment, that somebody else, that you're bad or wrong, as real but not true. And this willingness, this intention, just enter into the wilderness, this clay jug, this body of ours, this heart. And sense what most wants attention,

sense where the vulnerability is. And I invite you, if you'd like, just to put your hand on your heart as you do this, just letting, this calling on loving as a way of being with whatever vulnerability, whatever fear, hurt lives under judgment, sensing the possibility of letting in loving. And also sensing that as you, in this moment and perhaps as the evening goes on or through the week, these next days, let yourself sit down into

vulnerability that you're not alone that we're doing this together every one of us every one of us with us move millions of others our companions in awakening from fear at the bottom

we discover water the healing water of Bodichita right down there in the thick of things we discover the love that will not die. Namaste, thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations,

and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.