Tara Brach - Realizing True Well-being

Episode Date: April 13, 2011

2011-04-13 - Part 1 -- Realizing True Well-being - Buddhist psychology and the Western oriented field of positive psychology agree: How we pay attention determines whether we live primarily in fear and judgment, or happiness and peace. This two part series explores the teachings, practices and attitudes that enable us to live a meaningful life with a heart that is "happy for no reason." Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

To begin tonight's talk, I'd like to read you. This is adapted from a poem by Dana Falls. And she says, do not let the day slip through your fingers. But live it fully now, this breath, this moment, catapulting you into full awareness. Time is precious, minutes disappearing like water into sand, unless you choose to pay attention. since you do not know the number of your days treat each as if it is your last be that compassionate

with yourself that open and loving to others that determined to give what is yours to give and to let in the energy and wonder of this world experience everything writing relating eating doing all the necessary little tasks of life as if for the first time pushing nothing a side is unimportant. You have received these same reminders many times before. This time, take them into your soul, for if you choose to live this way, you will be rich beyond measure, grateful beyond words, and the day of your death will arrive with no regrets. So I wanted to begin with that reading kind of as an invitation, not just to presence, but to the sense of possibility of what is available to us if we really show up. And in Buddhist psychology and teachings,

there are two very complementary approaches to awakening, to freedom. And one of them is this pure presence right here, right now, this moment. And the other is really sensing possibility and cultivating the what's possible. The reason being that we get so habituated sometimes towards a limiting state of mind that to actively sense what's possible and invite it forward actually brings us into our wholeness. This latter approach in Western psychology

is kind of the gist of positive psychology, which many of you probably have heard of. And I was recently at a symposium, Marty Seligman, who's the father of psychology, was there and about 30, 40 other people really exploring how positive psychology can serve all the different sectors of our world. And I was very inspired, partly because one of the main tools in positive psychology is mindfulness. So we're seeing more and more of this culture. culture really incorporate learning to pay attention. And very inspired by sensing that in positive psychology,

the full frame of it is our potential to be really awake and compassion and free. So it's a very large minded psychology. What I'd like to do this week and next week is explore this but through a Buddhist lens. Explore positive psychology through a Buddhist lens. which means exploring the second part of how we pay attention, kind of bringing forth our sometimes unmanifest

and yet beautiful experiences of emotion and meaning and belonging. So as you know, our habit is in a day-to-day way, sometimes to get grim. I mean, we have a kind of complainer in our mind that's kind of gevching about how it all is. you know and so we do it personally we fixate and we can see it very much in the traditional field of psychology the emphasis is on what's wrong right and we can see it in the different religious traditions you know the kind of fighting against impurities and evil one of my favorite stories and if you've been with me for a while you'll remember it is one of these monks in a monastery but this is a new monk who's going to a monastery and he's assigned to help the older monks

and they're copying the manuscripts and the old canons and laws, but he sees that they're copying from copies. So he tells the head abbot that, you know, that could be a problem because if there's a mistake in one of them, it'll be carried forth through all subsequent copies. And the abbot says, you know, my son, you have a good point.

So he goes down to the dark caves, you know, in the vault beneath the monastery, to look at the original manuscript. Hours go by. Nobody hears from the old abbot. So the young monk's worried, and he goes down to see what's going on. And he finds him down there in this cellar, crying uncontrollably and beating his head against the wall,

slamming it against the wall. And he says, father, father, what's wrong? And the response is, the word was celebrate. So, you know, one of my favorite teachings from Ticknad Han is that it's not enough to suffer. We must touch peace also. It's not enough to suffer. We must touch peace. That in addition to contacting what's here, we really need to have a call on what's beautiful and healing in our heart.

And so we hear that. And then we're also warned. And this is Gide who says, know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. He says, once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation. So in a way, that's a really powerful word, obligation.

I think what it's conveying, that to be whole, we need to be really honest and contact exactly the pain and the shadow and the layers that are here as we explore regularly together and we need to be committed to contacting and unfolding the potential the peace and the tenderness and the happiness and the joy so it's interesting then when you begin to look at it through an evolutionary lens. How come it's so difficult and what's really possible? And the difficult side is something that many people might be familiar with that just our early primitive brain, our survival brain,

is really designed to fixate on what's wrong. I mean, that's the way we initially survived. The kind of reptilian brain and the limbic system are geared for safety so that if you're feeling at war, if there's going to be an ambush, you know, you're not going to start reading haikus or, you know, meditating or Qigong or any of that. You're going to kind of gear up for fight-flight. And we live fairly regularly with a sense of being at war. Even though we're not as physically threatened, our psyches ruminate. And we keep having thoughts.

that are worried or planning, that then create a biochemistry that makes us feel like we're at war. And so the limbic system and the primitive part of our brain has a lot of force, has a lot of influence. And as they say, you know, we are Velcro for negative events and Taflon for positive. Why? We're much more likely to take the imprint of trauma

and remember that than a time we saw a beautiful sunset. You know, it's just because we want to be ready for what can go wrong. But there's another part of the brain, too, as we know. And just to step back when I remember, oh, it's about five years ago, I was presenting at an L.A. conference on psychotherapy and meditation, and one of my co-presenters, who's a colleague and friend, Dan Siegel, gave us a little lecture on the brain. And he said, think of it like this, and I'll put up my hand.

He says, this is the brain stem. and he pointed to the wrist that's going up into the hand. And then the thumb that he placed over the hand, that's the limbic system. And then these fingers that curve over to make a fist, this is the cortex. Okay. So we've got buried in us the primitive brain,

but the cortex goes over it. And it's in this frontal cortex that we have our thinking capacities and our imagining capacities, our intuition, our capacity for empathy. the whole mirror neuron system that can really awaken care. And he said that, you know, as you learn to meditate, you actually strengthen some of the capacities in this cortex. This cortex also expresses this capacity we have

that's called meta-awareness, which is aware of all these processes of awareness. As we meditate, we strengthen this capacity to be recognizing even these. processes of thinking so that we're no longer so hooked in so that when we get the fight-flight signals we can recognize them but not be hitched into a reactivity that doesn't truly serve us so the idea is not to get rid of this stuff in other words we need our survival brain but it's to have full access to

the higher functions that that regulate the survival brain and that connect us really with our capacity for happiness, for interest, and for peace. So these positive emotions are all awakened when we start meditating. In the most basic way, this kind of higher part of the brain reminds us of our belonging to something larger. When we're in survival brain, we're concerned about safety and our whole sense of our being is this separate self. There's an isolation. There's a feeling of being apart. When we start awakening the higher brain, empathy, connectedness, we feel our belonging not only empathetic towards our own process, but towards each other, and a larger belonging to awareness. So I bring up these different parts of our brain because they really refer to, we have this capacity for surviving. and also for flourishing.

And it's that which positive psychology and Buddhist psychology focus on cultivating. The positive psychology movement is primarily settled on the language of well-being. And I think it's beautiful because well-being, this kind of health

or wholeness of being that really expresses what's possible. And one of my teachers, my teachers Sokney Rimbusha has a phrase that I really love and I wanted to bring in tonight, which is happiness for no reason, happy for no reason. That when we're living from a sense of wholeness, that sense of belonging, there is an experience of happy for no reason. It's not hitched to anything. There is a sense of being at home. And I consider I'm kind of defined finding in a way through the lens of Buddhist psychology what freedom might be experienced as a sense of being at home in our bodies, at home in our hearts, at home with each other, at home with the earth.

So in a way, one of the descriptions is that when we're really at home, we have a heart that is ready for anything. There's that kind of, we're resting in a largeness. Anything that comes along we can say yes to, we can respond to creatively. So I'd like to do a reflection on well-being with you to kind of ground the evening and then we'll explore it together more really what it means to us to experience full well-being, this happiness for no reason. And as a way to begin the reflection, as we often do, just let yourself sit comfortably, let the attention go inward.

And so this is kind of a self-evaluation, not in a judgmental way, but just with some curiosity to sense how much well-being you experience. And I'll use some of the dimensions that are highlighted in positive psychology. The first one really has to do with what's sometimes called positive emotion.

You might just ask yourself, how often am I feeling happy, loving, connected, interested? So just kind of just sense for yourself today perhaps. How many moments were there, where there was that kind of ease, some sense of belonging at home, happy? You might have been happy for reason or happy for no reason. Either is fine. And again, not to add a judgment. You might notice if instead you really felt that there was kind of a swamp of difficult emotions. Perhaps there was today angry or anxious, depressed. Just to notice without judgment, well, so how is it for me? You might ask yourself, how engaged do I feel in the activities I'm doing and working? and being with other people.

So this is another dimension of well-being, how much we just kind of let go of our circling of thoughts and just really immerse ourselves in what we're doing, how much flow is there. So again, sensing whatever activities you've been up to in the last few days and how much wholeheartedness. Again, you might notice if you're judging at all on this one. Another dimension of well-being,

how satisfying and interesting, are my relationships with others. How much belonging is there to others? So each of these dimensions has to do with belonging. Belonging to the moment, belonging to the activities, belonging to others. And then the last dimension, how much meaning am I feeling in my life? And by meaning really belonging to something larger than myself, serving something larger than myself. For you it might mean belonging with other people. It might mean belonging to spirit, to awareness, belonging to humanity, belonging to life. How much of a sense of meaning is part of what I'm doing, how I'm feeling? It's just having these reflections in the back of your mind.

And if you'd like to open your eyes, please feel free. Now for most people, their happiness level and by happiness I mean really the well-being of all these different kind of components that the general cluster of these components stays somewhat static it said that we have a set point and there's been a lot of research on it that even when something really really good happens and we get our life shoots up and kind of we feel meaning and engagement of this and that we kind of go back to our same set point after five to six months okay and when something really really bad happens and we

feel like our life is trashed and we've lost all meaning, all purpose, all good feelings, we still go back to that set point after five to six months about that. That's unless we're doing some sort of attentional training. Because what research has also found, and this is part of why the popularity of meditation skyrocketing, is that we have neuroplasticity, which means that our brains and the structure of our brains and the functioning of our brains changes in ways that we actually have a very different experience when we pay attention differently. It really allows us to experience happiness and peace. This is neuroplasticity. There's a saying now that neurons that fire together,

wire together, you know, and when we have continuously have certain thoughts always going, we're going to have certain biochemistry always going, kind of anxious or depressed, or whatever, when we start learning to train the mind and pay attention and step out of some of those thought patterns and open to feelings in a way that allows them to move through us and not freeze in us, different biochemistry. So meditation can change our set points. This activity of the higher brain that is bearing witness, you know, when you do the fist again, actually regulates the lower brain, the limbic system, and there's a seizing of some of the fight-flight activity.

So it's very interesting to sense that we have capacity to consciously evolve ourselves from the survival self, still doing what we need to do to take care of ourselves, but from identifying with the self that's just organized around safety to an enlarged sense of being that has a sense of belonging to life and to awareness. We can evolve ourselves in that way by meditating. Now, here's the deal.

Because we have such an unconscious fixation on something wrong, because it's so fixed, this evolving requires intention. We have to be purposeful about it. We have to intend ourselves towards well-being, towards this wholeness of being. And one of the stories I heard recently, a friend of mine from the West Coast described a community activist. This woman that told the story was participating in a year-long training group for people of color. And this activist had a childhood of poverty, trauma, and abuse. And she had faced the death of her parents and severe illness.

illness, divorce, single parenting, the whole deal, okay? And she talked about her struggle through the year to really to educate herself and to stand up for what she believed. And she described as she had become a radical in both local and national politics, you know. And finally, the last meeting of the group, this woman announced that after all the struggles and troubles I live through, I've decided to do something really radical. I'm going to be happy. I was just really struck by that because it's become clearer and clearer to me

that the more we wake up, the more intentional we get about waking up. We start sensing what matters and then we more consciously pay attention in ways to evolve and wake ourselves up. We start committing ourselves to these qualities, of can my heart have some balance in equanimity? May I be happy?

May I be free? So there's this purposefulness and one of the very best stories I've ever heard that came from the realm of positive psychology came from its founder when he describes this as the birth of positive psychology, the story. Some of you may remember it. I think it's so good.

He says this is one of these flash awakening that he had. It happened when my daughter, Nikki, and I were gardening, and she was just five. I should confess that when I garden, I'm goal-directed, time-urgent. Nicky was throwing weeds in the air and dancing around, and I yelled at her. She came back to me and said, Daddy, do you remember when, before I was five, I whined all the time? I whined every day. Did you notice that since my fifth birthday, I haven't whined at all? I said, yes, Nikki. Well, Daddy, that was because on my birthday I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.

And if I can stop whining, you can stop being so grumpy. So this is, I mean, this truly, this is the story he tells as the very birth of positive psychology. Now, why is it the origin story? Because it has to do with intention. You know, the Buddha said this entire life. life arises out of the tip of intention, that what you intend creates your experience. So what if you intended to be happy? Like you really intended it. And I don't mean by happy, a kind of graspy, personal happy of always feeling good and having certain pleasant experiences. I mean

the happy, and it's called in Buddhism, Sukha. Happy for no reason. This is a happy, a well-being that is happy because you realize your belonging. You just realize who you are, this awareness and aliveness that's your essence. And so there's not so much of that survival brain dominating moment to moment experience. It's not so much every moment trying to be more safe or comfortable because who you are is resting in something larger. So what if your intention was that realization of belonging, that resting in truth, that freedom and happiness. Okay, let's reflect again. Okay, closing your eyes.

Very simple reflection. Just let your attention go inward and feel yourself sitting here and feel your heart right now, whatever the state of your heart is right now. Just be aware, be mindful. Just from the place of sincerity and presence right now, explore what happens when you let yourself say, I want to feel happy. I want to experience this true well-being.

I want to feel at home in my heart and my life. I want to be happy. Say it a few times and let the inner whisper be as sincere and hear as possible. I want to be happy. I want to know that true homecoming belonging

inner freedom notice what happens sense if it brings up doubt about what's possible just to be mindful or maybe questions about deserving or maybe for some excitement about the possibility what if I really became more intentional you might imagine what you want

so if you're saying I want be happy just to imagine what that would be like. Perhaps is the sense of your spontaneity expressing, unencumbered, not holding back love, celebrating beauty. Perhaps you see yourself just physically more free, more open, more grace. Sense for you, what does it mean? What do you imagine? So this is the first step. This is the gateway in Buddhist psychology and in positive psychology to waking up the parts of us that are here, but often not our habit of contacting, to even have the courage to sense what we want, or even if we can't intend to be happy, we can intend to intend. You know what I mean? We can have somewhere in us that this is the way

we want to start aligning ourselves. And if you can begin to imagine it, and by the way, this is the practice of loving kindness, the meta practice, is that you offer a wish to yourself and you imagine it. Now there's research from Harvard that shows that if you can imagine something, it actually creates the brain states that allow you to start cultivating it. So if you imagine playing the piano, you actually start developing some skills. If your fingers are just, if you imagine your fingers playing the notes.

It's not as good as actually playing the notes, but practice actually stimulates parts of the brain. Imagine being happy. Imagine feeling a sense of belonging, more freedom. So then we continue to cultivate, and there's two dimensions, as I mentioned in Buddhist psychology. One way we cultivate is the presence with what's right here. We keep on sensing what's going on right here.

keep sensing our thoughts. We sense if there's limiting thoughts. So on one level, part of the commitment to happy is when we sense limiting thoughts, can we let them go? Can we start having this monitor that says, this isn't serving me? You know, what are the kinds of thoughts we watch? Well, the ones where we're jumping to conclusions. We know how we do that. Are the ones where we're negatively judging others. And I'm not talking about wise discrimination. But we start noticing what is interfering with this intention? You know, are we jumping to conclusions? Are we judging?

A couple of days ago, Jonathan, my husband, made a confession to me. And that's the way he started. He said, I have a confession. Then he said, on Sunday morning, I opened the refrigerator, and I pulled out the silk creamer, and I shook it really hard, and it went all over the kitchen, because the top was not on. all the way. And he said, and then I got really, really angry. And I was angry at you, me. And he said, and then I realized you've been away all weekend. So you, I had been teaching up a

Krapala. Anyway, I bowed to him. I thought, that's a great confession. But you know what, even if it had been to me, you know, because I do that kind of thing. You know, do we jump to conclusions, do we judge and can we when we're judging if there's one single gift you give yourself towards happiness notice when you're judging and sense what it's doing to your heart sense what it's doing to your heart so then we begin to see the thoughts see the judgments and let go let go this is e e. Cummings he says let go and before I read E. Cummings I'll just say one more thing Because this is just a kind of a friend recently described one of these processes, and he described it so beautifully. He described, because he had had a terrible breakup, and described how he went through another experience more recently that just left him feeling completely overwhelmed.

And he started telling himself how overwhelmed he was. And then he went, wait a minute, be present. So he was feeling it. And he realized, hmm, it's not just overwhelmed. I feel like a victim. I feel angry And so he started going through all the judgments he was going through about this past relationship,

the victim, the angry, is it just feel it, okay, feel the anger, feel the anger. And then he started feeling a sense of empathy for himself. Okay, I've been going through a lot. Empathy, empathy. And then she got included because once our heart starts softening, there's room for someone else.

He just stayed he didn't believe his thoughts. That is a, if we want to dedicate ourselves towards happiness, towards well-being, this is the next step. Come into presence and don't believe your thoughts. That doesn't mean you try to get rid of them. The letting go happens when you don't believe them so much. And E. Cummings' poem is called Let It Go. He says, let it go. The smashed word broken, open vow, are the oath.

cracked lengthwise, let it go. Let it go, it was sworn to go. Let them go, the truthful liars and the false fair friends and the boths and the neither's. You must let them go. They were born to go. Let all go. The big, small, middling, tall, bigger,

really the biggest in all things. Let all go, dear. So comes love. Okay, so the first step. Decide on well-being. intended. The second step, come back here into the present moment. Wake up out of the thoughts, the judgments, the quick conclusions. The third, sense the possibility that's here and cultivate it, the love, the gratitude,

the experience of joy. Two monks are sitting in this cartoon in this very peaceful, beautiful, Himalayan environment, and one saying to the other, I'd really appreciate it if you could refrain from shouting, Kaching! Every time you become one with the universe.

So we're not in the habit of expressing, I mean, even in the spiritual communities, we're sitting here really, you know, but it's like, can we let ourselves feel an express joy? And so we begin to train and the training and I've just mentioned two trainings and this I'm going to end after this bit of training to wake up the the wholesome emotions this training sometimes comes in the form of metta the loving kindness practice where we wish ourselves as we just did a bit you know

well-being and we imagine it and the other training that I really love that wakes up the sense of joy is gratitude. Now, I'll just give you a little piece of information on gratitude training that Marty Seligman shared. He said that he had been working with severely depressed people and he had them write down three good things that happened to them for 15 days. Okay, so that was the assignment. 15 days, they write down three good things.

Ninety-four percent of them reported decrease in depression. and 92% an actual increase in sense of happiness and well-being. And in his training, he says, his most effective thing he does is you pick someone, you feel gratitude towards, write a one-page letter, and then read it to that person and listen attentively to their response. Because this is a two-part exploration

in the fullness of well-being, I'd like to invite you to explore this this one. week, this gratitude practice. Because for many people, if you have a gratitude buddy, you know, somebody, and you just every day, and I did this for a while, just email that person. All you have to do is say in the email three things you're grateful for. It's amazing. Just try it. Just try it out. So gratitude, our meta, what they both do is they change what you're paying attention to. And what you pay attention to affects your experience. You start shifting your attention from what's wrong to what's beautiful, what you love.

So there's a story to read to you. I stand, this is, I can't remember the author, and I may have to tell you, I'm not going to remember the author right now, I'm sorry. But he writes, he's a surgeon, and he writes this, he says, I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh, I promise you that.

Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. her husband is in the room he stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight isolated from me private who are they i asked myself he in this rye mouth i have made who gaze at each other and touch each other so generously the young woman speaks will my mouth always be like this she asks yes i say it well it's because the nerve was cut she nods and his silence but the young man smiles. I like it, he says. It's kind of cute. All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a God.

And mindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers to show her that their kiss still works. I remember that the gods appeared in ancient. in Greece as mortals and I hold my breath and let the wonder in. So there's this understanding that grows in us that as we learn to see what we love, there is a space of belonging, of belonging to this presence and this heart and to each other that has room for this life. There's a profound yes to life, which is one of the, I think, the expressions of a fulfilled sense of well-being.

There's a loving what is. It doesn't mean we like what is. It doesn't mean there's not pain with what is, but there's a heart that says yes to what is and holds it with incredible tenderness. What makes it possible? Our identity has shifted. We're not caught in the separate survival. self that's battling and at war. Rather, we're inhabiting a limitless quality of heart and presence that can take care of ourselves as needed, but really knows who we are, knows that this life is what we're made of, and that this heart is our deepest expression of being. So we practice together in that way. And I'd like to just invite you.

We'll just do a brief practice and then close. Just to invite you to sense, you know, as you kind of take your posture again, just what we've explored tonight. These are the beginnings of this, the beginnings in key areas of really waking up our potential

for profound well-being and peace. First step to decide on it. That as you sit here, you sense your heart, even if your heart's a little bit wary, that there's something in us that wants to experience our full potential. So we begin with that first step of, okay, may I discover true happiness, this sukkha, this freedom of the heart, this capacity to love the life that is. So we sense that in ourselves. And the second step is to just honestly connect with what's right here

and know that thoughts are going to come, doubts, suspicions, mistrusts, that we can have the intention to not believe them. It takes some practice, but we can have that intention. To just keep coming here, this aliveness, this heart right here. And then the third step is that we actively cultivate these qualities of gratitude. And in this part, just to invite you to take the next

little bit of time in silence, to mentally reflect yourself, I am grateful to, and then just fill in the blank, or it might be I am grateful for, but just continue and continue to whisper to yourself, I am grateful for, it might be you name a person,

or you might name Spring or you might name something else that you find beautiful or deep or meaningful and so now silence as you sense what you're grateful for I'd like to invite you to bring to mind one person that's dear to you

that you feel a lot of gratitude towards for maybe in some way loving you giving something precious to you, taking care of you in some way, their kindness, just one person. Just sense the way they behold you if they're offering love, the way they look lovingly,

if they've given something, what they've given. And letting yourself feel your gratitude, mentally whisper thank you. Just say their name and mentally whisper thank you. You might say it again and again. And let the feeling of thank you fill your body and your heart and your mind so that the person and the situation can

back off a bit and just feel yourself filled with gratitude just what is the visceral experience of gratitude can you sense how large it is and how much it includes the boundless quality of heart so that if you're in a very simple way just feel yourself right here right now that this gratitude is in a way or a way of saying yes to this moment

loving the life that is like to close tonight with a poem from Mary Oliver that can express as some of how this aliveness can fill us it's called reckless poem today again I am

hardly myself it happens over and over it is heaven sent it flows through me like the blue wave green leaves you may believe this or not have once or twice burst from the tips of my fingers. Somewhere deep in the woods in the reckless seizure of spring. Though, of course, I also know that other song, the sweet passion of

oneness. Just yesterday I watched an aunt crossing a path through the tumbled pine needles she toiled, and I thought, she will never live another life but this one. And I thought, if she lives her life with all her strength, is she not wonderful and wise? And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything until I came to myself. And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand, I have flown from the window of myself to become white heron, gray whale, fox, hedgehog, camel. Oh, sometimes already my body is felt like the body of a flower. Sometimes already, my heart is a red parrot perched among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming. Today, again, I am hardly myself.

It happens over and over. It is heaven sent. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.