Tara Brach - Saying Yes: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Saying Yes: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield - In this rich and full two-part interview, Tara speaks with renowned poet Jane Hirshfield about the interface between poetry and meditation, the centrality of acceptance, and the pathways of remembrance that reveal our belonging to this world and open us to caring. Jane's most recent book is "The Asking: New and Selected Poems" and the interview includes readings from this beautiful collection. Order your copy of "The Asking" at: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715681/the-asking-by-jane-hirshfield/

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome, friends. I'm joined today by a special guest, a new friend, and a long-time inspiration, Jane Hirshfield. And Jane's a renowned poet. I know many of you know of her. a quote from Wikipedia among the modern masters writing some of the most important poetry in the world today. She's won many awards and for poems for essays. And it's really considered one of the American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere.

I love that language, spokespersons for the biosphere. So she's a visiting artist among neuroscientists, a long-term. time Zen practitioner. And as you'll see, if you're not familiar, her poems are sourced in a beautiful, deep wisdom and a passionate love of our world. So wholehearted welcome to you, Jane. Well, thank you. I am so happy to be speaking with you. So I thought I just jump in right with your words, reading. Jane writes, I've been given this existence these years on this earth to accept what has come into my lifetime. Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness. I must take them. I must find a way to live in this world. You can't refuse it.

And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of us of all of us and figures out what is our comfort? conversation. What is my responsibility? What must be suffered? What can be changed? How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I'm lucky, can be of service? So I wanted to start here. I was really struck by it and remembered back to my very first retreat where the realization was that the boundary to what I can accept is the boundary to my freedom. And so I was really struck by what you wrote, Jane. I'm just wondering if you can speak some to what it means to really accept what comes into our lifetime. What makes this

so central? Well, for me, it has been a question at the center of my life for perhaps my whole life certainly for decades, how to say yes to everything, which is an idea which was first placed into my awareness in that language. The first week I was a guest student at San Francisco Zen Center in the Page Street building. Someone, there was a guest student tea and whoever was leading it. I don't even remember who the teacher might have been suggested that we try the practice of saying yes to everything. And of course, this is a bit like, you know, the famous quote, the perfect way is not difficult. Only avoid picking and choosing. And we live in these bodies and we have experiences. And we have to pick and choose all the time. You know, discrimination

is part of the path. We can't pretend that we just lie back, you know, like a plant that really must accept whatever rain and sun come to it, whatever animal steps on it or eats part of its leaves. And yet this practice of saying, whatever comes to my life is my life, that has been a central quandary, wish, task, endeavor, thing to ponder. And so I have spent a lifetime, especially, you know, it's very easy to say yes to the things we like that have happened. What's hard is to say yes to the difficult things. And for that, poems have helped. Practice has helped.

The experience of the meditation cushion is an invaluable education. We learn if we stay with our experience long. enough, all of it is our sustenance and our nurturing. And I would not want a life in which I did not experience the hardships and the difficulties that come to all people, nor is it possible to have one. The traditional story of the Buddha discovering old age sickness and death come to us all. You know, there's no human life, however privileged, however lucky that will not be devastated by losses, by illness, by empathic grief for the suffering of all beings. And so I've spent a lifetime, you know, working with this very question.

And I love questions. You know, there's a reason this new book which is out, which is 50 years of poetry, some of them knew and many of them gathered from, you know, the Ark of a Life. lifetime. It's called the asking. And one thing I realized is I've spent my whole life practicing with questions, the asking. I love that you are framing it that way as a question and I want to show the asking. And I want anyone looking to note all the post-its because when I love something, I posted it. it. And it's just filled with beautiful, beautiful poems. And so I want to stay with what you said

about really the intention to say yes to whatever. I think the most challenging for most people is saying yes to our sense of who we are, to our sense of self, that there's an idea about who we are, ways that we are, that is very hard to be okay with. Probably one of the biggest sufferings on the planet is a revulsion, aversion, aversion, a not okayness with how I am. And I know for myself, I found that only by truly saying yes to how it all is in this idea of self, can I free myself from self-centeredness? It's like fully accepting this beingness allows the identity to kind of dissolve. It's the only way to transcend an exclusive identity with self is to accept self.

And yet it's so challenging. So I thought I'd bring that in for us to look at. Yeah, so you know, you are the teacher of radical acceptance. And, you know, one thing that, so of course the etymology of radical is root. And one thing about a root is a root has no existence except in its permeability to what is beyond itself. You know, a root exists to take in the world. And so it is both solid and insolid. It is both an identity and a communication, a conversation.

So the self, the identity is both dear and tender to us, and we must hold it in the same way as a person would hold a child or a bowl or the figure of, you know, the baby Buddha that we pour sweet tea over on April 8th, To hold ourselves as tenderly as we try to hold everything else in this world is a great act of self-forgiveness because our lives are full of errors and mistakes. And it is very easy to fall into abashedness and vulnerability and worry. And yet, if you cannot treat yourself with kindness, you cannot treat yourself with kindness, you cannot treat others with kindness and the other way. You can practice in either direction,

which is one of the great discoveries of the malleability of our lives. How do we work with our lives? And for me, one of the happy realizations as a poet, all poets, you know, young poets who are beginning to publish and go out into the world, that changes your relationship to writing. I began writing as a private child hiding things under the mattress.

It was not about talking to other people. It was about creating a space of safety and of exploration outside of judgment in which I could learn to become more intimate with myself without the world shouting at me, which the world did a fair bit in my young years. so it was a place of life raft for me. And then when you, if you begin to publish, which remains for me, one of the great perplexities of my life is how does a person who is by nature solitary, hermit-like and perfectly happy to work on a desert island, I would write poems in sand and let the ocean erase it every day. and I would be happy. But somehow, life asks us to become whatever it is we think we're not. You know, whatever boundary you put on your idea of yourself, life will tell you no, no, there's more.

We ask of you more. And then somewhere along the line you discover, it is indeed a happiness to, as was in that quote that you read, to realize that you also can be of service for me that was a great shift in self-understanding. But all of that is preface to saying, one thing, somewhere in my early 30s, my relationship to revision in poetry changed.

So you begin revising just because, oh, other people are looking at your poems and they tell you they're confused or it isn't working or whatever. And then at a certain point, I really understood that by, revising my poems, I was in fact revising myself, revising my life, revising my relationship to the world. And that very sense that it is even possible to do such a thing is quite reassuring when we're being hard on ourselves, because then another sort of great realization along the way was when I began to understand that the almost unbearable negative emotions, they are information.

They are telling you that something in your relationship to the world wants deeper looking at. And the more unbearable the emotion, the more it is asking you to say, what happened here? How can I make amends? What can I do differently? Am I thinking about this wrong? Am I failing to understand, you know, the pain and suffering that created this situation on my part, on another person's part, on all of our part, because we are human? And all of this for me has been, you know, left foot practice, right foot poetry, looking at it through both of those.

For me, Soto Zen, which is my lineage, it is a very silent meditation practice. Shikantaza meditation is not the koan practice of Rinsai Zen. It is a silent opening permeability with, yes, a little bit of inquiry because you need an engine, or you'll just sit on the Zafu and be inert. but it is not a practice of words. And for me, this collaboration of the wordless and words has also been something I treasure in my life and in my path. Oh, there's so many threads I want to pick up on.

At first, I was just struck when you back a bit, we're speaking as a child or young person, just finding that refuge. And what a refuge it is. I mean, I shared with you in our corresponding that I've been in kind of a Jane immersion. I've been just really taking in your poetry. And I found that I'd be then walking through the world more with poet's mind and what I'm mean by that is really sensing the mystery shining through everything, you know, the ordinary, the messy, you know, just like way wider open. There was once a term I heard of living like a room without a roof, you know, just more open. And so there is a power, whether I'm speaking as the recipient of the words, but there's a power in, in poetry.

to go beyond the words into an experience that is sacred and can be cherished. So I wonder if you might like to speak a bit more about the relationship between the kind of attentiveness that comes in meditation training and the attentiveness in that deep inner listening and then writing where you're creating a poem, revising a poem, going deeper through a poem, maybe just to give us a little more sense of meditation and poetry. Well, I think that, you know, this central intention or desire for deepened attention and wider, more permeable awareness is for me at the very, center of both these things. So many years ago, I said something which became for a while the most

quoted thing that I'd said. It made the rounds. And now it seems to have quieted down a bit. But it was, I was on a telephone call with somebody and it ended up with me saying, well, you know, all Buddhism can really come down to seven words. And they said, what are they? And of course, I hadn't thought about this before, and I suddenly, you know, mustered out of the air exactly seven words, which were everything is connected, everything changes, pay attention. And, you know, there are many things which have to be found in those words. Compassion and tenderness need to be found. They aren't on the surface. But I believe they're there. Inside everything is connected as our tender, familial relationship with all being. But anyhow, many years down the road, you know, maybe six or seven years later, I finally thought, oh, you only need two.

All you need is pay attention. Because if you pay attention, you will see everything is connected and everything changes. So that's a sort of, you know, metal level answer to the question. And the ground level, the root level answer to the question is the great joy I feel. in any moment's deepened saturation in existence. It can be frightening for people if the self falls away and you suddenly don't have this self you're used to walking around in. And yet, you know, every one of the experiences in my life

that I feel most deeply, were moments in which I actually wasn't there. And, you know, this can, you know, we can talk about this in terms of, you know, the experiences that come in meditation or come spontaneously to, you know, I love, years and years ago I did an anthology, women in praise of the sacred, 43 centuries of spiritual poetry by women. And one woman is in there not so much for her poem, but for her life. She was a Welsh potato farmer.

and she would go into the back shed to fetch potatoes and fall into a mystical trance. And, you know, that story just had to be in the book. You know, there were too many aristocrats and special people, and the Welsh potato farmer absolutely had to be in there. But one finds fearlessness by staying with something and realizing in the field of practice on the meditation cushion, on the page, these are to go back to what we were talking about earlier, they are places where you can know things and nothing of consequence will happen as you explore, as you feel, as what comes up is met, because you're not going out and saying something to someone,

you're not acting, you are just exploring in this field. And it gives you a way to be brave and experimental and intimate and unfrightened of your own experience. And then of what comes as you both draw closer and also become, you know, throw open the windows of your life. and somehow doing this over and over for many years on the meditation cushion and on the page, it changes your relationship. And for me at least, it has raised in me, you know, an ever-increasing just sense of, you know, what in Dante is called the Divine Comedy, the forgiveness of our human, we will be human.

And the Roman writer Terrence, who said, nothing human is alien to me. That if you understand that, you know, what any human does anywhere on Earth is in you, is in me as well, and can somehow transmute that to some words that evoke

a little more compassion a little more tenderness. For me, that has been transformative. And it's, you know, it's case by case, it's word by word. It's always this particular moment, this particular instance, this particular mountain I open my eyes to every morning and then one morning see something about it I hadn't quite seen before and that becomes that day's poem. And then you work on the poem and you find a little more. A poem is like the meditation cushion, it is a field of discovery. It is not for me the record of something I already know. It is the record of the exploration of finding the recipe for the alchemical transformation or for the

pot of rice, you know, whichever. But something is created. And as you were saying earlier, much of that happens in fact off the page. You know, the words are the recipe. The cooking pot is us, bringing our lives, our experience, our hearts and minds, our history, our hopes to those words, and feeling what it is that they are creating in this vessel of transformation. and the transformation happens in us. The words are just the ladder rungs and then jump off the 10,000 foot pull.

You know, as you say that, because it really resonates that whether we're talking about the form of poetry paying attention that way, our meditation, either way, the attention itself opens us to a larger beingness. Yes. We come to inhabit, for embodied a larger sense of beingness. And I think of prayer much as in the same way.

In fact, poems can feel like prayers in that it's, and when I speak of prayer, really mindful presence rooted prayer that where there's a sense of communing, that the prayer is a kind of communing with the what's larger that is what we are, but we're not always in how. it and so it becomes that bridge between a sense of more confined separation and becoming more into that wholeness. I love the way you talk about the wholeness that includes it all, the ocean that includes all the waves. And I want to read another reading now, Jane, that maybe invite your comments because you brought

up the word question. So here we are. It's my nature to question. to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this. It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy, and where there is joy, there will be sorrow. The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being

is why good art thrills. Acknowledging the fullness of things is our human task. And I just want to name I just want to say it again, acknowledging the fullness of things is our human task. And I wanted to read this because that's very compelling to me. The use of even of the word task because it feels like acknowledging the fullness, you know, inhabiting the wholeness. It's our evolutionary potential.

But it's also a task because it takes intentionality and it takes practice. because we also have evolutionary currents that rather than that wide lens, you know, that really includes that something's called open focus or, you know, our attention narrows. When we get stressed and the survival brain takes over, it's such quick conditioning to not look at fullness, but to grasp onto one piece. I think Daniel Conneman says it so well with the fast thinking. It's just our brain goes for what very quickly will reinforce our views, the familiar, you know, what helps us feel comfortable, feel better, and it's reinforced by the algorithms of social media. So I'm saying all that because it's so powerful when you say, this is our task, to acknowledge

the fullness, not to get in that trance of the partial. So I'm inviting you to speak more to it because it really spoke to me. Well, I think I feel that we have a kind of inner instrument of some kind. I don't know if it's a gyroscope or a compass because it goes in all ten directions in past, present, and future, but there is something in us which feels constriction and tightness and separation and narrowing as painful. And there is something in us that recognizes that when the grip of these things can loosen,

it just feels better. And I don't know, you know, maybe there are people who are truly so damaged that that inner instrument has been silenced. But if that is so, it is because of what we're, was done to them. And, you know, there is no one on earth who access they do except because they are the confluence of many histories and many, you know, being bullied as a child or being raised by the most loving parent who dies when you're seven. You know, there, there are a

are reasons for our constrictions. I also, this is a little bit of a side note, but you made me think by talking about evolution of, I have a peculiar theory. I like to formulate theories. It's why my research science friends like me is, I might not be very good at designing a proper experiment, but apparently I'm good at asking questions. So one of my hypotheses has been that, you know, As I think anyone who has had an opening in the context of practice, of an intensive session or retreat, one of the things which is so perplexing is why does it fade? Why do we revert to our old self in a week or two weeks or three weeks or three months? and suddenly one day go, oh, didn't I feel the world differently and where did that go?

And my hypothesis is, I hate to say this because I also love the idea of the perfection of things exactly as they are. But the mind of awakening is counter-evolutionary in that if you truly do not feel yourself, as something you need to protect and take care of. If you truly just feel yourself as one with everything, then you will be as, you know, the Jadaka stories of, you know, the Buddha's lives on the way to becoming Shakyamuni Buddha. He does things like he sees a hungry tigris and her cubs stuck on a ledge on a cliff below him

and just says, oh, they're hungry and jumps off and gets eaten. You know, genetic continuance doesn't marry very well with beings who don't take care of themselves long enough to survive and procreate. And so that's why awakening is hard because evolution put many things into us which counter awakening, which ask us to be self-protective. And, you know, the marvelous thing about this human task is we get to feel. and navigate both and see if there isn't a way, both to stay alive for as long as it makes sense for this life to continue, and also to not over-engage with only our own self-interest, because you begin to see that at a certain point, if you are not completely engaged with the well-being of all beings, we are seeing that, we are

can find no well-being. Inequality creates violence, mindless consumption creates a biosphere that we are harrowing of all of its resilience and vibrance

simply by finding it more pleasurable to buy something wrapped in plastic than to grow something. Or to find our pleasures not in consumption. This is a,

a huge, you know, can of worms I'm opening and perhaps we should move on from it. But what I love your hypothesis, Jane, because it allows for compassion and forgiveness, because we, especially people that are formally on a quote unquote spiritual path, there's this idea of egosiness and how we're really supposed to be unattached to the welfare of a separate self, whereas everything in our nervous system has been designed, to try to take care of this self. And so the, to me, this deep question of, you know, how do we totally recognize that this is part of a dimension of reality, that this is just how it is. It's a truth that we're rigged to take care. And that's, and not to add a bad good, but just say

that's how it is. And there's a possibility of taking care on that self level with an inner awareness, awakeness, tenderness that sees that that's happening. And so we're not exclusively identified with the self that's taking care. And that over time, there's more and more of this capacity to rest in that largeness that's holding the waves and allows the waves to do what they're doing, but is not in a deep way constricted. And so I feel like that's what we're kind of of moving towards. And I know for myself, there are times that I get that message, as you described, with suffering of, oh, my gosh, I'm living in too small a container and it hurts, you know. And there's a wisdom that knows to relax the clutch, to not defend my heart so much, to not try to protect

the self. And yet the self can't engineer that. So then that leaves just, for me, it leaves prayer. like that that heart space that knows there's a larger world to live in, that inspires prayer and then letting things be as they are. But I think all of us are in one person called it the big squeeze that you describe, you know, with human conditioning and also the potential of radical freedom. Yeah. And you know, we are also, we are mammals. We live. We love. live both inside our own nervous systems and muscles and bones and shapes and lungs and and relationships to the world as air creatures rather than sea creatures. All of that, that is our task also to, you know, be kind to our ribcage, to be kind to our

hearts. And, you know, one thing you said at the beginning of that last response really struck me, which was the wrong idea that the, at least I think it's wrong, that the goal of a path of practice would be to not exist, to have no self. No, that is not the goal. In this moment, we are inside our human lives. And I don't want to turn my back. on the absolute, you know, luck of getting to witness existence through this particular vessel of consciousness and physicality and embodiment. The world is glorious. And even in the greatest dire, difficult crisis,

some tiny sliver of that can usually be found. When you talk about prayer, I love that and I hear in it that prayer is one of the paths of how do we remind ourselves of what we realize that we have forgotten. and meditation is one of those reminders, prayer is one of those reminders. For me, the path of poetry is one of those reminders. There are infinite things which can call us back when we realize that we have forgotten who we might be. Exactly, the remembrance, the pathways to remembrance. and I'm thinking right now of a poem I'd love you to read that really has to do with wholeness and fullness.

And that's, I would like. Yes. Let me. This is in The Asking. It's a beautiful book. Thank you. So this is one of the new poems at the start of the book that were written since the last published book.

Let me, I might need my reading glasses. Let's see. Six of one, half dozen of the other. I would like. I would like my living to inhabit me the way rain, sun, and their wanting inhabit a fig or an apple. I would like to meet my life

also in pieces, scattered, A conversation sat down on a long hallway table, a disappointment pocketed inside a jacket, some long-ago longing glimpsed, half-recognized, in the corner of a thrift store painting. To discover my happiness, walking first toward, then away from me, down a stairwell, on two strong legs all its own.

also the uncountable wheat-stocks how many times broken beaten sent between grindstones before entering the marriage of oven and bread let me find my life in that too in my moments of clumsiness solitude in days of vertigo and hesitation in the many year-ends that found me standing on top of a stove-topsied, to take down a tracklight. In my nights asked, sometimes answered, questions. I would like to add to my life, while we are still living, a little salt and butter, one more slice of the edible apple, a teaspoon of jam from the long simmered fig. To taste, as if something tasted for the first time, what we will have become then. taking it again and taking it in with the energy and tone of your voice, which is so beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. For anyone that reads and rereads, it just kept going deeper, Jane, when I read it and just the sense of that beating down of the wheat and the oven and the bread. and, you know, the leaf to the gold or the diamond, you know, just feeling the unfoldings. So one of what comes to mind is there's a courage inside this that is a willingness to feel. And I think of that classic story of people bringing their sufferings to the sage,

and sage would swear them to silence, and the inquiry was, what are you unwilling to feel? And whenever I asked that, it's like all of a sudden, again, something opens up because there's such a habit of, you know, and the reverse of what you're sharing in this poem of, I don't want or I do want, you know. And so your unconditional yes. I mean, I feel like this is our stream and our current friends.

I hope you've enjoyed part one of this interview with Jane Hirschfield. I certainly have. We started this recording and the intention was for it to be one piece. And then as happens, we began to engage and the content was so rich and alive, we gave ourselves permission to keep going. So I hope you'll join us again next week for Part 2 and perhaps treat yourself to a copy of Jane's recent collection of poems, The Asking. And meanwhile, may you find your way to a deep yes to the challenges, the beauty, and the mystery of day-to-day living.

Blessings, friends.