Tara Brach - Secret Beauty - Solstice Talk (2015-12-23)

Episode Date: December 26, 2015

Secret Beauty - Solstice Talk (2015-12-23) - This solstice talk explores two pathways to realizing the Secret Beauty that is our essence. One is through the compassion that arises when we stay with vulnerability and suffering, and the other is through love that arises as we learn to see the goodness that shines through all beings. 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 thanks and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. So this is a talk geared for the winter solstice and for many practitioners in different spiritual paths this time of year in the northern hemisphere is sometimes felt as particularly conducive for really deep, deep quieting and realization with a lot of the dark, dark days and so on. And it's interesting to me that there's really two kinds of darkness. And one is the darkness of the fertile void, you know, that the whole, all new life comes out of this

fertile void. And it's often described as this darkness as the mother of the universe, of the universe, a kind of black luminosity out of which the whole creation comes forward. And then of course the second kind of darkness is the shadow of that, which is the darkness of unconsciousness and ignorance and the not seeing of truth, the not seeing of really who we are and who others are. And in that not seeing, there's the potential to violate, to violate others, to violate ourselves, to violate the earth. And that ignorance, it's really the ignorance of separation, that what we're not seeing is our innate connection and belonging. So I always love this one teaching from Carl Jung where he says that our suffering

arises from the unseen, unfelt parts of ourselves. That's basic ignorance, what we're ignoring, what we're not including, what we're not seeing. And of course this is true for our society too, that when as a society we can't face the fears that are there, we go about trying to make others the enemy and destroying them. So perhaps a central archetypal spiritual inquiry for the solstice is when we get caught in some dimension of that unconsciousness, you know, when we feel our lives are caught in some way in judgment, are in habitual, be able to be. behaviors that push others away or make war on ourselves. How do we shine the light of awareness?

How do we begin to include in awareness that which we haven't really been paying attention to? So that's one of these great inquiries and what it leads to is how do we really recognize what Thomas Merton described as the secret beauty. that is within each of us. I mean, how do we move through the world and really see other beings, and I mean all species, and see that secret beauty?

Thomas Marin says this. He goes, Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable.

This is true. How do we realize that? So tonight I'll reflect on two pathways of reflection, meditation, attention that help us to include what's unseen and wake up to the secret beauty. Really another way of saying it is that teach us more to stay with the places that we run away from and how to intentionally look to see what we might not be seeing in ourselves and each other. And both come down to learning how to pay attention. I think it was Krishna Murti, I'm not sure though,

who said that the most profound expression of love is simply our full attention. That when you pay full attention to whatever it is, you become connected in relationship with it in a way that brings up love and we see it with those that our parents know that we've just poured so much attention as being this being has a specialness that we actually just if that being just emanates with such deep meaning and preciousness we've paid attention and I see it with people and their dogs because we all you know

many of us are dog lovers we love most dogs but we really love our dog, you know, that kind of thing. So one story that struck me, I thought I'd share with you, when my son Narayan was six years old, we got him for Christmas an ant farm. And

he and I used to sit around and we'd watch the ants make their little tunnels and we were particularly amazed by, they have the graveyards, you know, in these ant farms. They create a graveyard and they take their dead ant corpses and drag them over to the graveyard. And we really paid a lot of attention

to how, you know, the way they work and the way they team up and so on. And I'll never forget the day I picked up carpool and Narayan got in the car crying because his friends at school had been stamping on ants. And to me it was like this really perfect example of he had just paid attention to these living beings and they became, they stopped being other. Do you know what I mean by other? They were real. It has to do with paying attention.

One woman went to a series of classes that Ram Dass, who's one of the great teachers of our generation, offered in Oakland. And at the end they were sharing how the class affected her, and she raised her hand. And she said that every day when she went to work over the years, she had passed by a homeless man and by the entrance to the metro, and she'd put money in his cup. But then she realized she had never really looked at it.

really looked him in the eye. And she was afraid and when she looked into it she said she was afraid and she said because if I really looked at him he'd be sleeping in my living room now because we do fall in love. We do start caring when we pay attention. So the challenge is that we all have ways of shutting ourselves off because our habit is to not want to be overwhelmed

and not want to feel discomfort and not feel pain. So our habit is that we get kind of mental about the suffering around us and we'll take something in and go, oh, that's terrible, did you hear about such and such? And we'll feel bad about it at a certain level, but it's still more mental because we're armored, we don't really let ourselves be touched because we're afraid it'll be too much.

And if there's trauma, it's true that we can, can get overwhelmed and that for some people there's that kind of sensitivity that we do need to be careful. But for most of us it's more a habit of defending our hearts. And when we stay cut off, we're not connected to our inner realness either. It's not just unreal other. There's also our whole being is not awake. We're not open in our hearts.

And then when we feel threatened, rather than that we're not, we're not even, we're not even, then feeling what's there, we lash out. We go right into blame. And I remember, as the story of a little girl talking to her teacher about whales, and the teacher said, well, it's physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because the neck is, the throat's too small. And the little girl stated, well, Jonah was swallowed by a whale, and so the teacher was irritated and reiterated. A whale can't swallow a human. It was physically impossible.

And then after a pause, she said, well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher said, what if Jonah went to hell? And the little girl replied, well, then you ask them. So we have this thing about being right. So meditation,

meditation actively deconditions resistance. I mean, that is what we're doing. When we sit and get quiet, we're training ourselves to come back to what's right here. It's a very direct, you know, the brain has got a lot of neuroplasticity to it and these habits of leaving, we can change.

So that's what we're doing. That is the most profound thing we're doing, really, is that we're training ourselves to stop leaving. We're training ourselves to be right with what's here. You know, they've been able to look at it through MRIs and see how meditation activates the prefrontal cortex, where there's actually the compassion networks are there, and we can actually feel and feel tenderness

towards the suffering inside us and the suffering inside another. We can become a mindful witness that both is engaged and yet stays balanced in a certain way. So I wrote a lot about this in both radical acceptance and true refuge

and after one man read it, read the, you know, really how do we learn to stay with difficulty and find some balance in the midst? He wrote me a note. He said, thank you. This is Eduardo Okubaro. He says, thank you once more. Your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some day. ago when I had terrible renal colics due to a kidney stone. Once I expel it I will name

the stone after you. It was the greatest honor I've ever. So the alchemy of compassion is that when we do pay attention, whether it's to the ants or to the suffering inside us when we really get their suffering. In other words when we don't say, oh but I should have done something different or oh other people suffering. for more, but we just get nice, really clean and direct, ouch, this hurts. This being is hurting. There's a natural tenderness that arises. That's the alchemy of compassion. That if we can stay directly in contact with the realness of pain, there's a sense of tenderness. And I find that when people start doing it with themselves and then get how often they've been caught in

suffering, there can come a kind of soul sadness where there's a sense of our incarnation and how it's been squeezed in a certain way by being down on ourselves or ignoring ourselves. And it's actually the beginning of real transformation. Same thing when we pay attention to each other. If we really are willing to stay, if we're really willing to look at another and wonder, what's it like for this person? We don't do that much. We're pretty self-centered

and I'm not meaning that as judging ourselves. It's just the habit of the mind. But we can see what happens in a more societal way. And I keep going back in my own mind to the sea change that happened in relating to the Syrian refugees

when so many of us saw that one image of a drowned boy. the Ayan Kurdi Boy, who on the shores of Turkey, that one image opened the doors of hearts and of countries. It's so powerful when we let ourselves connect with the realness of suffering. I think of it with the climate talks in Paris

that enough people on this earth are directly connecting with the realness of the dis-ease of Earth. that there's some shift in consciousness. It's got a long way to go, we know. But there's some shift because we're connecting with the realness of suffering. And then what we begin to do is sense that this is what we have to keep doing in our inner life, that we have to be willing to stay with what's going on inside us.

And I'm curious, how many of you feel like that's part of your conscious way of practicing to try to stay with vulnerability and inner discomfort. How many of you feel like that's conscious in your practice? Can I just see by hands? So for those of you are listening, that's about 90%. It's a growing consciousness. And when we do, the more we have that habit of saying, oh yeah, stay with ourselves and each other,

the more there's some magic of real connection possible. Emily Bennington wrote about this experience of when her mom first found out she had breast cancer. And she said, if you've been in a situation like this, you'll recognize the flood of emotions that hit you all at once. The initial shock's truly overwhelming. And as it usually does, my mind immediately went into planning mode. What needs to happen? What are the treatment options?

How soon can we get the lump removed? So there she was with her mother asking these questions and thinking like this. and she goes, thank God for this practice, pausing presence, because despite of a complete head spiral, I still had the presence enough to ask myself a very important question. What am I noticing right now? This is a pause. This is stepping out of the reactivity.

Okay, what's going on? And in that moment, I was able to see something I would have missed otherwise. My mother didn't want to talk about any of those things. As I was weighing her options, lumped me with sentinel node biopsy or mastectomy, etc., she sat in the high top chair in my kitchen, staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake in mind, but it suddenly became clearer that wasn't what she needed. She was scared and needed to be scared. I debated whether to give her a hug, which sounds terrible I know, but I was barely holding it together

and scurring around, making dinner, pouring over doctor's paperwork, trying to avoid a total collapse. Being present allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room and wrapped my arms around her. It was an awkward sideways hug, but it was also a long, necessary one, and then something happened. Slowly she started rocking side to side like a mother rocks a child except the child was now the caretaker. It was a sweet tiny moment I'll never forget and one that I surely would have missed were it not for the power of mindfulness. Learning to stay opens up the space that gives us our life. That's when it becomes real with our inner life, with others.

So just do a brief reflection on this because this is the first pathway. So closing your eyes and we'll just take a pause together and just notice what's right here. what is happening inside me right now, that question. And can I let it be? Can I let it be just as it is? One sage asks, what have we been unwilling to feel? You might sense just scan your life a little and sense what's going on that you've been in some way

not wanting to feel, what vulnerability, what fear, what sorrow. And for these moments, let your intention be just to stay a bit, to offer that attention that can truly transform. It might deepen your attention a little feel where whatever might be vulnerable, might be scared, might be sad, is living in your body. And just for these few moments, offer a genuinely kind attention. and that means that if you'd like to also offer a gesture of kindness,

that can be a really powerful part of staying, just simply putting your hand on your heart or your cheek, two hands on your heart, so that you're really communicating inwardly, I'm here right now, I'm here, I'm attending, I'm with you. Notice what changes in just a few moments of offering a touch, attention to something that you might have actually pull away from. Rumi says, keep your gaze on the wounded place, this is where the light enters, sensing

what happens as you offer your presence and perhaps noticing more of what I sometimes call heart space, that you're resting in a more open, tender awareness. This is the first pathway. to stay begins to open us to our secret beauty to that tenderness, that compassion. Or as Thomas Merton says, to the divine that shines through. As you'd like, you can relax your hands down if your hands have been on your heart and open your eyes if you'd like. So the first pathway is very intentionally staying with what we run from and then in that

staying, discovering the tenderness, the heart space. that's there, that facet of secret beauty. The second one is to begin to intentionally look toward what some people describe as our basic goodness, others as just the beauty of heart and awareness itself. And the challenge of that is that we are deeply conditioned to fixate on what's wrong. And that's part of our survival conditioning. It's the negativity bias. so that we move through the day and a lot of the time,

in some way it's as if we're trying to solve a problem. We're living inside the idea that there's a problem here. And sometimes the problem's directly what's going on with me and sometimes it's you. But in general, that's what our attention focuses on. So again, neuroplasticity. We are trying to recognize that and shift to including in a very deep way

the secret beauty. So we have to begin to notice the patterning. And when I saw this, this is one called dogs in conversation, and one dog saying, well, I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless incessant barking. So seeing the goodness within ourselves means beginning to trust more and more

that this heart right here and this being, this intelligence, is wisdom is really here, just trusting who we are. And again, that doesn't come easily. In another cartoon, there's a wizard reading a crystal ball and a woman's listening eagerly and the wizard says, you'll fall for anything. And her thought bubble says, uncanny.

So we tend to fixate on other people knowing and not ourselves. It's as one woman here wrote a book and the title is all sickness or our real sickness is homesickness, that we don't trust and take refuge in the awareness and the heart that's right here. So the practice is to begin to scan and get more familiar with goodness and trusting it. And one of the great models, as many of you know,

is the Dalai Lama. And about, now it's been about 15 years ago, I went to a teacher's meeting out at Spirit Rock, and I had the good fortune of sitting in the front row, so I got to spend hours kind of watching him and watching him interact with different people and so on, and was really in awe of the consistency of respect and attentiveness and warmth. It just wasn't manufactured.

It was just the who he was. That was his secret beauty. and a friend described going with him to the hotel that he stayed at and when he left he wanted to thank everybody he had everybody this by everybody everybody to cleaned rooms prepared meals everybody in the hotel basically and he went and thanked them all and then the Secret Service were making comments that the ones that have been assigned to protect you know these are people

that have been protecting heads of states and prime ministers and so on and they said there's something different about the Dalai Lai Lai He treats us as if we're special. Again, Thomas Merton says, The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else.

It's such an amazing gift to be able to look at another person and see the light that shining through them, see their brightness, their humor, their goodness, and in some way let them know. It's such a gift. And when we do that for others, you know, they, it comes out of them. It's like we're drawing it right out of them. There's many, many practices of seeing the goodness. Some of the basic principles are start where it's easiest. And for many of us, it's easiest to see goodness in the goodness in the

the very young in their innocence. So I thought I'd read you a few of children's teachings on love just to begin to warm us up to seeing goodness a little more. And there were, this was questions that were given to children ages five to ten about love. And one was why love happens between two particular people. And the response was, I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn't supposed to be so painful. That's Harlan, age eight. What is the proper age to get married? First answer.

84, because at that age you don't have to work anymore and you can spend all your time loving each other in your bedroom. That's Judy, age 8. The second answer, Tom, 5. Once I'm done with kindergarten, I'm going to go find me a wife. Some sure-far ways to make a person fall in love with you. six-year-old, tell them that you own a whole bunch of candy stores. Alonzo 9 says, don't do things like have smelly green sneakers.

You might get attention, but attention ain't the same as love. And then another one. One way to take the girl out is to eat. Make sure it's something she likes to eat. French fries usually works for me. Well, enough of these. So there's a training in seeing the goodness. And in the loving-kindness practice, we often start with somebody.

It's very easy for us to love. And it could be our dog or a child or a grandparent or somebody where it's uncomplicated. And we start there. And then we begin to widen the circles. Once the heart space starts relaxing open, there's more room for more and more beings. So, that's the practice.

And where the training gets challenging, and this is going to be the last part of what we're going to explore, is that, as I mentioned, when we get triggered, when we get armored, then we have to be able to see past our reactivity to the real human that's there. And one way we get armored is in a societal way that we have inherited certain implicit biases against some people. We tend to be down on people that we think are of a lesser class or a different race or religion. So there is a lot of conditioning to see another person and do an immediate flash evaluation that makes some better and some worse. We do an up-down kind of thing. And we're very subject to this conditioning. It can be very, very invisible so that we don't even think that that's there.

that if it's there, that implicit bias, the other is an unreal other. And I want to share with you a story I share once every year or two that had probably more effect than any other story in having me dedicate more deeply to waking up from that. So you can sit back and if you've heard it before, maybe like me it can be like a good poem, a good reminder. It was told by a Unitarian minister who was describing during a family trip what happened. Trip was on Christmas Day. She was traveling with her husband and two children and they stopped at a restaurant that

was nearly empty, walked in and her one-year-old, Eric, was in a high chair and she heard him squeal with glee and he's saying, hi there, hi there, these are two words he thought was one. And his face is alive with excitement and then she says, I saw the source of his merriment and my eyes could not take it in all at once. A tattered rag of a coat, baggy pants, both they and the zipper at half-mashed over a spinly body, gums as bare as Eric's, hair uncombed, unwashed, and his hands are waving in the air, flapping about on loose wrists. Hi there, baby, hi there, big boy, I see you buster.

My husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross between, What do we do, and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, hi there. Every call was echoed. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my husband. beautiful baby. I shoved in a cracker at Eric and he pulverized it on the tray. I whispered why me under my breath. Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting from across the room. Do you know Patty Cake? Adaboy. Do you know peekaboo? Hey look he knows

peekaboo. We ate in silence except Eric who is running through his repertoire for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. Finally we had enough. Dennis went to pay the check and implored me, get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trundled Eric out of the high chair and looked toward the exit. The old man sat poised and waiting, his chair directly between me and the door. Lord, just let me get out of here before he speaks to me or Eric. I headed towards the door. It soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back, walking to sidestep him in any air he might be breathing. As I drew, did so, Eric all the while, with his eyes riveted to his best friend, leaned far over

my arm reaching with both arms in a baby's pick-me-up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye to eye with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms wide open. The bum's eyes both asked and implored, would you let me hold your baby? There was no need for me to answer since Eric propelled himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head on the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor gently, so gently cradled my baby's bottom and stroke his back. I stood awestruck. The old man rocked

and cradled Eric in his arms for a moment and then his eyes open and set squarely. on mine. He said in a firm, commanding voice, you take care of this baby. Somehow I managed I will from a throat that contained a stone. He pried Eric from his chest unwillingly, longingly, as though he were in pain. I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me. God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift. I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me.

After I listened to that, I just went through this kind of scan of my life and how many people I just hadn't seen. I had kind of put into a category and, you know, just in some way let not be real and let my heart not include. And one teacher says that, you know, really the whole path is to not put anyone outside of our heart, including ourselves. And that doesn't mean if somebody has got violence or whatever that in our day-to-day functioning we put down our self-protection, but it means that our care is there.

We shut down. So it takes a commitment. it takes an active commitment to wake up from our conditioning, whether the biases have to do with this is the kind of sexuality that one should have, you know, heterosexual or whether we have a bias about gender identity or whether it's about race or class or somebody's appearance or their body shape or the way they speak. we very quickly evaluate and put down ourselves and others.

And we do it as societies, and it's going to take a commitment from each of us and then widened out into our societies if we ever really want to bring harmony and peace to our earth. So the training begins right where we are with the people around us. I remember my first supervisor when I was training in, in psychology, his practice was, and he termed it this way, and this was decades ago, to see the beloved and everyone, and to get really, really astute about seeing patterning and conditioning.

But he knew that if he could honor the goodness, that he could help take a look and shine a light on any conditioning and help a person wake up out of it. That's the way we operate. This poem is by Christy Sharshell, who just put together a poetry book. It's a beautiful poetry book. And it describes in this poem some of the practices that we can take on if we really want to begin to override our conditioning. And some of it is to see who's there and some of it is to let other people know we see them. Because if you see it, that's one level of opening up to the heart space, but when you express it, when you say thank you for being you, and when you say I love you,

that actually activates and allows the full flowering of that heart space. So Christy writes this, she says, say, I love you. Say it randomly to the people closest to you, to a stranger on the street, to yourself in the mirror, tell someone what you love most about who they are. And then another thing, there can't be too many, just say it out loud.

Watch it light them up. Watch it light you up. Say I love you. Say it again and again because everything else is just idle conversation. So tonight on this solstice night we're really exploring, waking up to heart space

to seeing that secret beauty, learning to stay with what's difficult and finding that tender space of compassion and learning to see the goodness. We'll do a very short practice again now on seeing the goodness. If you will, just come sitting in a way that allows you to deepen your attention. As you come into stillness, take a moment to let go of any tension you're aware of in your body. You might soften the shoulders, relax and soften the hands, loosen, soften in the belly.

Just take a nice full breath, bringing to your attention. someone who's easy to love could be a child or a pet a friend or a parent a spiritual figure teacher colleague somebody who's easy just to feel and sense the goodness

be aware of what it is that brings up your sense of appreciation the gleam in the person's eyes or the way they show love to you the brightness beauty humor, aliveness. Just imagine yourself expressing your love and your appreciation and that other person receiving that. And as you feel that and sense that, sensing that person's secret beauty and your own secret beauty, that loving heart, that appreciative heart that's right inside you, sense that heart

space widening to include others so that in the next few moments, whoever comes to mind, just since you're glimpsing secret beauty, the light that shines through being's eyes, the warmth, the glow of the heart, the look of aliveness when someone's happy, their mischievousness, their humor, that basic sentience, and Thomas Merton, and it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts,

the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other, closing by simply feeling the heart space. that is attuned to that secret beauty and an expression of that secret beauty.

May our lives be lived from that heart space. May all beings trust and realize loving presence. May all beings touch great and natural peace. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free. Namaste. talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.