Tara Brach - Self-Forgiveness

Episode Date: August 4, 2010

2010-08-04 - Holding ourselves with a compassionate, forgiving heart is the gateway to healing, and to intimacy with our world. This talk explores our deep conditioning to be at war with ourselves, and the insights and elements of forgiving that can carry us home to loving presence. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

So I'd like to begin tonight's talk with a very well-known exchange from the Buddha scriptures. The Buddha once asked a student, if a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? And the student replied, it is. The Buddha then asked, if the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful? The student replied, again, it is. The Buddha then explained, in life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.

Some of you, I'm hoping that this is familiar teaching. The first arrow is when we're caught in unwanted emotions, when we get carried away by jealousy or anger or caught in obsessive thinking or some sort of a compulsive behavior like overeating or lashing out in anger, that's the first arrow. No matter how much we think we should be able to control ourselves, if we could, we would. It just happens.

But rather than attending to the first arrow and often to the really deep wounding under it, sometimes trauma under the first arrow, what we do is we shoot ourselves again with the arrow of self-blame. Isn't that so? Stuff happens that we really don't like about ourselves and then we're just shooting second arrow after second arrow after second arrow.

We really nail ourselves, so to speak. And this second arrow is what the Buddha called optional. What he meant was that if we can begin to recognize that's happening, we can recognize how we're reacting to ourselves, we can use our hearts to stop the war. We can stop the war. We can stop the self-blaming. and then begin to bring a healing attention to the first arrow.

And another way that I think of it is without forgiveness, unless we let go of the self-blame, we can't heal the basic woundedness in the heart. So tonight we'll be exploring really this practice of letting go of the second arrow of self-blame, forgiving ourselves. And I really think of it as the key to intimacy, that we cannot be close with others if we're turned against ourselves. It just doesn't work.

So I'll be sharing a few stories that I found instructive and we'll do a guided meditation as we often do on this. And then next week the talk will be on forgiving others. So this week we're going to focus on ourselves. And by way of definition, to forgive means to let go of the protective armoring of hate and blame that

encases our heart. To let go of that protective armoring. And I use a language of refuge and love that forgiving, that letting go of the armoring is what allows us to love. And in the Buddhist teachings,

the practices of loving kindness, the precursor is forgiveness. The precursor. Now, some people when they hear the language forgiveness or self-forgiveness it has some loaded connotation so as you're reflecting tonight you might prefer to use the words when you feel like you're down on yourself self-compassion or self-acceptance if that sits better for you so a reading this is adapted from the teachings of babuji an indian master he says break your heart no longer

Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart. You pull away from the love that is the wellspring of your vitality. But now the time has come, your time, to live and to trust the goodness that you are. There is no evil, no wrong in you. Your true essence is pure awareness, aliveness, love. Let no one, no idea or ideal obscure this truth. if one comes forgive it for its unknowing just let go and breathe into the goodness that you are so while this letting go of armoring and opening our hearts is really the portal to all healing it's usually the very

hardest thing for us it's the last thing we feel able to do it's like we have an incredible resistance towards softening towards ourselves. And that's especially true when we are looking at the ways that we've either caused ourselves or other suffering. A couple of my stories have to do with parents because as a parent,

and this is true for hurting anyone you love, but as a parent, it can be particularly poignant, sensing that you've caused injury to your child or to your partner or to a friend, it's very, very hard to forgive that. So we'll be looking at that. And if we're honest, we find out that we don't only turn on ourselves for major transgressions, but it's pretty daily.

So we'll be kind of going at that level some too. Now, I have encountered more people than I can count for myself who live with a sense of an intrinsically bad or defective self. and then many, many more who might not feel flawed at the core, but feel profoundly imperfect and have a hard time with it. So I was motivated to write radical acceptance because of that, and I've shared with some of you that when I first went to teach, I went around the country to teach on radical acceptance, I went to Noropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado,

and facing me as I entered in the building was this huge, poster and it had my picture on it and announced the workshop and under the photo was the phrase something is wrong with me so i always thought of that as this what a welcome to a new community to teach and you know something's wrong with me and a student attending uh joked with me he said he joked with me about a therapist saying to his client you know these feelings of deficiency are common amongst the deficient you know so we kind of went on and on i i i I shared one I had read in a journal, psychology journal, about a man who's journaling in his diary,

and he's writing, Dear diary, I'm sorry to bother you again. So it gives a little perspective to hold it lightly. It's such a pervasive experience, especially in our culture. We know it. We know it in ourselves and each other, how much we get down on ourselves.

And so there's a kind of relief and sensing or kind of a shared humor in it. And when we can laugh at our own foibles and others and not think it's so personal. I remember when my son was in grammar school and junior high in particular, he never wanted to try things he wasn't sure he'd be good at. And he had a lot of problem when he'd make a mistake.

You know, he really didn't like being wrong about things. And I was trying to loosen this up in him. So I'd often share, you know, these kind of bloopers or stories about silly things so that he could just kind of relax a little. I don't know if I shared this one with him, but this is a kind of example of children's answers at Bible school to certain questions. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. He fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times. One answer, another. When Mary heard she was mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.

I love that one. The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption. I'll just read a couple more. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony. These are true. And then, all right, last one.

When the three wise guys from the east side arrived, they found Jesus in the manager. So we know it's pervasive and we also know this getting down ourselves and we also know how deeply tenacious it is. It's very hard to convince ourselves to talk ourselves out of some basic notion of I'm bad, I'm wrong, I blew it. This is a reflection on who I am in a deep way. It's not just that we think something's wrong. It feels that way in our bodies. Okay. It's not just an idea.

And I'm regularly asked, because I speak a lot about acceptance and forgiveness, I'm regularly asked the questions, well, what if I really hurt someone and I'm continuing to do so? I mean, doesn't that mean, should I forgive myself? Should I let myself get away with it? How am I supposed to trust my basic goodness when I see the injury that I'm causing? Questions like that that are really powerful. You know, people often think that forgiveness is some way, that you're kind of in some way condoning or giving permission to the shadow side, that you're turning your eyes away from something that needs attention by forgiving. So these are what I consider misperceptions, but they're strong. And I think one of the deepest ones is the sense that if I forgive myself, if I stop blaming myself, I'll never get better. I'll never change. I'll never be able to control what I hate about myself.

Does that sound familiar? Is that? Okay. So we're addicted. We're addicted to self-blame. We have some idea that that's better than letting go of the blame. And the first story I want to share with you is about a man who was very addicted to anger and addicted to blaming himself for his anger.

Now, this guy, Sam, successful corporate executive he had a very large staff he had project managers under him and so on he was demanding he was impatient he was perfectionistic and when it didn't go his way when somebody didn't do things the way he expected he'd blow up and um he just basically lay them low he he just blast them and he did this to his family too and they had a holiday party he insulted his wife in front of the catering crew for not ordering correctly. His daughter comes home late from a concert, and he unleashes his fury at her,

and she ends up racing to a room and locking the door. Now, often after an outburst, he would feel terribly ashamed and sometimes apologize or find ways to make up something to another person. But in the moment of rage, his sense was of being wronged, in that in some way others were deliberately undermining him and disrespecting him in those moments.

That's what he felt. So when he heard me speaking about forgiveness, he basically said, you know, you're talking about forgiveness or acceptance. If I forgive my anger, it'll get worse. It's irresponsible. And then he basically looked at me and said, you know, there is an ugly beast in me. It's violent. I hate it.

It makes me hate myself. So that's just to give you a few. feeling for where he was at. And the question I asked him, which I often ask is, does hating the beast, does condemning that part of you in any way mute or ease the anger? And you know what the answer to that one is, right? I mean, hating that part of ourself, hating the craving that leads us to binging, hating the jealousy or hating the neediness that has us cling on to someone, or hating the fearful parts that push others away. doesn't make them go away, right?

Isn't that true? I mean, he knew that. He knew that. So we spoke, and I basically told him, and this is the reality about forgiveness, is that we're not condoning what we don't like. We're not giving permission. We're just releasing the blame and hatred.

We're releasing the aversiveness towards ourselves, the second arrow. I talked to him about our conditioning and at one point I looked at him and said you know Sam it's not your fault that this anger is so strong and that it gets unleashed the way it does it's not your fault

and at that point his eyes teared up because he really wanted I mean he didn't want to feel bad about himself but I'm going to say a little more about it's not your fault because that evokes so much in us the main message to him was you can't get rid of the anger, but you can shift how you relate to it. And that is the main message for all of us, that the first arrow is going to play out as it does. We can't always control that

we get fearful, insecure, needy, grasping, acting out, but we can shift how we relate to it. When we forgive, when we let go of blame, it frees us to access our natural intelligence and compassion. It frees us to do that. Okay, a comment on the languaging of it's not your fault. I found it's a really important understanding.

And I know it goes against a lot of, and brings up outrage sometimes because there's a sense of, well, does that mean people that do these really horrific crimes that we're just saying, okay, it's not your fault, dear, you know? So if we want to really look honestly,

the things about ourselves that we hate are conditioned by innumerable forces way out of our control. They're conditioned by genetic tendencies towards anxiety and depression. Aggression, too. They're conditioned by cultures that are plagued by addiction and violence.

They're conditioned by an environment with pollutants that affects our nervous system in ways we don't even know through the food, through the air, through the water. And in a very basic way, how our parents and caretakers treated us, we treat ourselves. We are imprinted very, very early on. I remember just on the lighter side, a cartoon that I really liked, and it had this mouse, was the psychoanalyst. Okay, so the mouse is in the mous hole.

You've got to imagine this. And outside the mouse's hole slumped against the wall is this big feline, really dejected-looking feline and the doctor, the mouse is saying, well, don't worry, fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal. And we can get it when we see animal behavior, but we're animals. And we're animals conditioned by a diseased culture. And stuff rises up in us that we don't like. It's not our fault. So Sam and I talked about this and then I gave him an assignment because he was at a retreat when this was really unfolding, a meditation retreat. And basically the assignment was whatever arises as you practice here at the retreat, bring mindfulness to it. In other words,

if it's anger, if it's shame, whatever is bring mindfulness to it, feel it, be with it fully, and just have the intention to forgive, the intention to regard it with a kindness. Okay, that was his assignment. So I'm going to tell you what happened, which is that he, started reliving his rage at his daughter that night that she came home late and relived seeing the fear in her eyes and then his huge shame his enormous remorse for the way he acted he said that my heart was pressed down by this huge hot weight and overwhelmed by a sense of core badness so that was what he was bringing for presence to is feeling that in his body and then he started to say it's not my fault over and over again. And I'm going to read you this because I wrote it down. He said,

I was saying as if I was trying to get her to understand and forgive me. And then I realized I was saying it to my father that I was five and he was in a rage at me for something and it really wasn't my fault. And I was trying to make him understand. So Sam was, you know, then he's just started weeping in a way. He said, I saw, then I saw him losing it with my mother and then I remembered him spanking my younger brother and yelling on the phone and I got it. He couldn't control himself. It was like he was on some drug totally at the mercy of his fury. When I remembered that, I knew I had to forgive my own anger. It really isn't my fault. It just happens. So that's when he began the forgiveness practice. He put his hand on his heart and this is a way I teach it often. You don't have to put

your hand on your heart, but I find it makes it more contactful and intimate, and just sent the word into his own being, forgiven, forgiven. It could be another language. It could be saying in the word, I see and feel the pain I've caused others, and I forgive myself now. That's a classic phrase. You know, it could be, I'm okay. I'm okay. There's basic goodness here. It's okay. In some way, removing the blame. But for him it was forgiven, forgiven. And as he did it, something unclenched, something opened. And he just said, as he described it, it was as if my heart had the space then for who I am, and also for that little boy that couldn't make his father understand, and also for my father, there was space. And he said, for the first time, my imperfect self felt really okay.

So I share this with you because it's incredibly difficult when we've heard others or when we're hurting ourselves to even begin to stomach the idea of it's not my fault because the fear. The fear is that we'll lose responsibility. But the irony is it's exact opposite. When we soften our hearts to ourselves, it actually allows us to respond. to our life, we become more responsible, respond from intelligence, because we're coming from a more whole place. The Indian sage, Srinar Sargadatta, he writes that when we awaken, when we realize the truth of who we are, our wholeness, we can't exactly say what happened. We can only put it in the negative and say, in some way, we get it that nothing is wrong

with me anymore. And it doesn't mean the imperfections. The human stuff is gone. It means that there is a sense of the basic goodness, the love, the awareness that's here, and a sense that we can relate to it in a way that's wise in healing. Sometimes I use the metaphor of ocean and waves, that we're abiding in an oceanness and the waves we have room for. Not only do we have room for, we can honor, we can love and we can respond to. So let's look closer together at the process of forgiveness. Let's break it down a little. The key element to self-forgiveness is contacting the realness of our suffering.

Self-forgiveness is a version of compassion. To feel compassion for have that quivering of the heart, that softening, we have to contact the vulnerability. Now for one woman, Vanessa, she was at a maximum security prison, and I don't remember what she was there for, but she was there for a long time, and she attended a Buddhist meditation class led by one of my friends. Vanessa was over six feet tall. She had dyed red hair, tattoos all over her body, and she was known in her ward as a bully. Okay, she really intimidated the others that were there and protected some women and kind of relentlessly insulted and terrorized others. During the meditation class, the other participants would join in and ask questions, but Vanessa just kind of sat there silently with a kind of permanent scowl.

But she never missed a session. Okay, she was there at every session. At the end of the series, there was kind of a go-around, and she went last sharing how it was, each person said what they liked or didn't like. And Vanessa said, well, what I really liked was the poem about the pirate. Okay, so here's the poem about the pirate. This is Tikna Han. It's called Call Me by My True Names. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird, which,

which when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I'm the frog swimming happily in the clear pond, and I am also the grass snake who approaching and silence feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

Please, call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please, call me by my true names, so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. So that was the poem she heard. And what she said was, well, that poem, it got me thinking.

It got me knowing something. And she spoke very, very softly. People had a strain to hear her. She said, all my life, I was the bad one, the problem one. And now I know I am suffering too. So the group got very quiet and still. And she had tears in her eyes, but most everyone was just looking at the floor, respecting her words.

This realization, I am suffering. too. After that group graduated, so to speak, my friend continued to teach courses in her word of mouth. Vanessa really was transforming in a deep way that she was no longer a bully. She was a much quieter person coming to terms with the realness of kind of the layers that have been buried in her. So what we find is that self-forgiveness, no matter what we've done, no matter what we think we're forgiving is a movement towards truly being able to contact others, truly being able to contact others. When we're down on ourselves, and we know it, when we kind of look at our lives, when we're down in ourselves, there's really no way we can trust that another cares, and there's not the freedom

to express love to them because we're shut down. So there's this way in which removing self-being blame begins to open the space, the field of loving, what I sometimes call the field of loving. For one woman that I worked with, she was in a standoff with her teenage son and they couldn't communicate. He is doing drugs, skipping classes, and she was so angry that he would just keep withdrawing. Whenever they were together, she couldn't do anything but judge and attack, and he was completely he completely pulled away so we did a session and we started I did as I often do ask the question what most wants your attention and she said you know I feel angry and then she said well I feel fearful he's going to totally life's going to be a train wreck and then but she got

down deeper and said I'm ashamed and I said let the shame have a voice and this is if you're familiar with rain this is just investigating what's really here let it let it let it let's let me sense the feelings and the beliefs. And her shame basically said, you know, I've been letting down everybody all my life. I'm a terrible mother. I'm a terrible partner and so on. And so I slowed it down even more and said,

so what's it like to sense that all your life you've been letting people down? What's the feeling of letting people down? And it was a feeling of a kind of a hollow ache, like there was no hope at all for, being close and just badness, you know. What's it like to have had that as the undercurrent for your whole life, to always feel in some way you're falling short? So that was the moment she had what I sometimes call the ouch moment where she had an undiluted sense of the reality of suffering.

It wasn't suffering like as in, well, I deserve this or other people have it worse. So, it didn't have any modifiers. It was direct contact with, ouch, this being is hurting. That's what opens the door to self-forgiveness. So for her, it was, she began to weep and she was experienced I sometimes describe as a soul sadness, which is when we really get a sense of the shape of our incarnation and how many moments has our life been in some

way contracted or are made small by our self-judgment. How many moments have we not been free to really love? Have we pulled back our love because we didn't feel worthy, our confident? How many moments do we just not enjoy the moment? Because we're so busy focusing on that sense that something's wrong with me. I think we all have that soul sadness. Most everyone, I know, feels a sense of loss of life moments, for having been in some trance, I call it the trance of unworthiness, the trance of deficiency, where we haven't been free to live our lives because we've been so turned on ourselves. So this was the case for her. And again, that's when there was a shift where she could begin to offer forgiveness to the parts of her that felt like

they were falling short. Again, forgiveness not meaning it's true you're falling short. Forgiveness meaning let go of the blame, the hatred, give space, not push ourselves out of our own hearts. So it was interesting for her that she practiced at home regularly. Each morning she did what I call a forgiveness scan. I do it myself a lot, which is she would just sense, okay, what am I holding against myself and there's usually a list i can say for myself there's a list that you know in some way i spoke to somebody and they asked a question but i didn't really tune in i gave a kind of stock answer or my sister wanted to bring her dog when she visited but i didn't want extra dogs around or you know things that i'm in some way feeling oh what a selfish person or well how unattuned or that and they build up

so i do this forgiveness scan where i'll say okay what's the list and in some way they'll come up and I'll just, again, I like to put my hand on my heart, just say, forgiven, forgiven. And just the intention to soften begins to create a much more spacious quality of heart where I'm not buying into the notion of something's wrong with me. I'm just seeing it as it's operating there, but it's not something I'm so identified with. So she did that practice, just kind of scanning and sensing. saying, well, what needs forgiveness? What am I holding against myself?

And started finding a lot more space and a lot more gentleness towards herself. And then she would bring her son into her heart and in some way send a message of, you know, you're good. I see your basic goodness, which is always the most beautiful thing we can do is see another person's goodness. She just did this in her meditation.

And things started changing. She found that on Saturday she was going out and getting his everything bagels so they'd be warm and he'd have everything bagels when he got up. And he brought out the garbage without her asking and, you know, those like outrageous, wonderful things that you don't expect. Things were happening. And at one point he came in and kind of lounged on her couch in her office and asked her advice on something. So things shifted. And when we spoke, she gave me this really, this kind of wistful look and said, I understand what happened. She said, by letting go of self-blame,

I created room for him in my heart. And then she was wistful saying, I wish I had understood this sooner, but it's not too late. It's really not too late. We have very strong habit patterns. Our neurocircetry keeps doing its thing of thoughts and feelings of something's wrong with me. And the power of mindfulness of awareness to notice that is our innate gift. We have that. So there's a training and the training is actually as symbol as I've been describing it that when we catch ourselves first it takes a kind of commitment this intention that says I really want to stop the war. That's the beginning. And isn't that us? I mean, don't we on some deep level want to stop the war as much as we're addicted to it?

So it's just getting more conscious. That's my aspiration. If you leave here and you're just a little more conscious, or if you're one of the people that's listening to this from some other place in the world, and you get it that, you know, from this moment on, that's my prayer. I just want to stop the war. I want to free this heart so that I can love without. holding back. That has an amazing power. We'll speak next week about forgiving others. It's so difficult, but we can have the intention to forgive. The intention not to push ourselves or anyone else out of our hearts. This is a poem by Peshah Joyce Gertler. She says, finally, on my way to yes, I bump into all the places where I said no to my life

all the untended wounds those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy let's practice a little bit at this point together so feeling yourself sitting still sensing this as a pause that lets you arrive.

Re-relax your shoulders, soften the hands, take a few breaths. And in the stillness, in the silence, you might just invite whatever wants attention, wherever in your life, you're just conscious of pushing yourself out of your own heart. some place you get down on yourself

and approaching this with a sense that this is a life process it's not one little guided meditation but that you can sense your intention to stop the war that that's what you wish

that you could regard yourself these waves of conditioning with more compassion with a forgiving heart. So sensing where you are at war. And it may be for some that it doesn't feel like self-hatred, but that you just know that you're on your own case in a way that's not so healthy. But it might be something to do with how you treat others.

You might be down on yourself for something to do with work, for a way that you treat yourself, perhaps an addiction. Maybe you're down on yourself for obsessive thinking or being judgmental. If there's a situation that really captures, but gets you down on yourself, let that come to mind. Maybe there's something, the way that you behave with another person. Just let it be very close in and vivid, whatever helps you to get in touch with what you are down on,

or blaming yourself for. So you can see the behavior, the way you express yourself, or the way you treat another or yourself. And just let yourself a moment feel what it's like to be turned on yourself. Feel that sense of self-blame, the feeling tone of it,

self-aversion of some form. What it's like in your heart, in your body, in your mind, when you're turned on yourself. It's your sense of your own being. For many, it's a sense of your own being. For many, it's a sense of smallness and badness, maybe shame or fear.

And you might ask yourself the question I asked the woman I told you about, which is how long have I lived with this? How much has this been in my life? For some, the feeling of not okayness is as long as we can remember. Just to acknowledge that if that's the case. And if it helps to put the hand on the heart or the cheat,

or the belly or wherever you feel yourself vulnerable. You might experiment with that right now. Just acknowledge the suffering of self-aversion. It's something most of us live with. It's a layer in there. It's looking through the eyes and feeling with the heart is just your wisest kindest self. Just acknowledging, okay, this is the ouch place. Hawaiian healer uses the words, I'm sorry and I love you. just acknowledging, okay, there's pain here. So you begin to inhabit that space of compassion towards just the self-aversion, the pain of it. And as you feel that, that softening,

you might begin to send the words forgiven, forgiven, or whatever words for you in some way help to release the blame. And send the words and the feelings of forgiveness to whatever is going on inside you. You might be aware of your angry behavior, or clinging behavior, hurtful behavior, and not to condone it, but not to push yourself out of your heart,

just to forgive by removing the blame and hatred. Forgiven, forgiven. And if you feel resistance, forgiven, forgiven to the resistance. So that, not that, things really exempt. If you feel disconnected right now or numb, forgiven, forgiven to that, unconditional self-compassion. You can explore by sensing how deeply sincere the forgiven, forgiven can be. Forgiveness can be bottomless. It takes us to the whole ocean of love. Truly forgiving.

if there's another person involved in your situation sense as you really open that forgiveness and tenderness of heart what happens as you then allow that other person to be in your heart how differently the relationship feels to forgive as to somehow honor your basic goodness and know the conditioning is what's happening break your heart no longer each time you judge yourself, you break your heart. You pull away from the love that is the willspring of your vitality. But now the time has come your time to live and to trust the goodness that you are. There is no evil, no wrong in you.

Your true essence is pure awareness, aliveness, love. Let no one no idea or ideal obscure this truth. If one comes, forgive it for its unknowing. Just let go and breathe into the goodness that you are. It's a way of closing this meditation. Allow yourself to open the attention to realize all the beings everywhere that really struggle in the same way. that you're in a room of people and part of a field of people that are actually listening

and contemplating with us on this from around the world and that we all have this conditioning this tendency to turn on ourselves and this possibility of choosing to stop the war to free our hearts so just to send your prayer

that beings everywhere can be free from self-aversion, that beings everywhere can learn to trust the basic goodness of their hearts, that beings everywhere can realize loving presence as their true nature and live from that loving presence. I want to thank you for, I could feel your participation, and I really honor that, your sincerity in being here. So thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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