Tara Brach - Sheltering in Love - Part 1 (2020-03-25)

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Sheltering in Love - Part 1 (2020-03-25) - During this time of pandemic, we need, more than ever, to feel our connectedness—true belonging with our own being, each other and all life. These talks explore the bodhisattva path - practices of an awakening being dedicated to living from love. The invitation is to let this season of close-in and global suffering deepen our collective commitment to creating a more compassionate world.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. Well, I'm really delighted to be with you and I want to thank you for joining in. You are my community and we're all in our little places here, most of us anyway, somewhat sequestered. So it is beautiful to connect and those of us that are giving us, talks online, we're learning, we're trying to learn how best to do it. One of the training invitations is to maintain warm, steady eye contact with a little red ball, the camera. So what I'm doing right now is I'm trying to do that and I'll be, my eyes will go over the place because I

have some different readings on my computer and so on. I'm sharing this all with you because I just want to be real. And I'm imagining you. Really, we're all over the globe. I know we're connected all over the globe and all going through so much. And I've heard from so many during these days of global pandemic, this notion that our world will never be the same and that it's unlike anything we've experienced in our lifetime. And for many, it's forcing us to deepen our practice, deepen our path, deep in our understanding of how we are relating to this really out of control existence. So in that spirit, I thought I'd share a little bit of an opening story. The greatly beloved Rabbi Schechter was on his deathbed with his people surrounding him.

They're awaiting his final words of wisdom. And in a faltering voice, he uttered, life is like a fountain. So those closely circling him passed the word through the crowds and word went down this long line of people in the hall and it was passed down the stairwells to people thronging outside and down the edges of the crowd. And there a little boy was told the rabbi's words. And he said, well, what does that mean? And people didn't know. So the question was passed back through the crowds, up the stairs of the building, through the hallway, to those circling around the rabbi to his very closest assistant. And he whispers the question into the rabbi's ear.

And the rabbi response, so maybe it's not like a fountain. That one spoke to me. And I have to say, it would be much easier to be in person just to sense whether it speaks to you. But many are realizing that amidst this mix of so much pain about what's unfolding, we need lightness, sometimes salliness for sure, and we need beauty. We need really to feel a wholeness of our life. It's really interesting for us to get a feeling for how much the world has changed. You might sense what were your worries, your concerns a few weeks ago, are for some of you, because this has been a wave that's crossed the globe maybe a couple months ago. But what were your worries or concerns?

And now, what are they? And we can see what changes when physical survival and our basic financial security, when all of life just kind of shifts around and is up for grabs. One of the most well-known quotes from Carlos Castagnata, who wrote about Shaman Don Juan was this. He said, an immense amount of pettiness is dropped away if your death makes a gesture to you. Or if you catch a glimpse of it,

or if you just have the feeling that your companion death is watching you, an immense amount of pettiness falls away. And isn't it so? There are different kinds of deaths. There's our own bodily life that can go. There's dear ones. There's also the death to our identity around our job or financial security. And there's the death of an assumed way of life.

And as we know, through the centuries, epidemics have torn through human societies. And when they do, they become a mirror to how we relate to mortality, to loss, to change. to how we relate to each other, our level of morality, of care. And of course, it's been mixed news how we respond. You know, if we investigate our response in the midst of these, really, these kind of crises that lay bare our life, we're either reacting from fear or in some way we're responding from presence and love. But that's the spectrum. And here's what's important.

and this is coming to the theme for our reflection this evening, is that given the scale of this crisis, given that it's affecting all of us, if a good number of people are collectively intentional about responding with presence and love, there's a good number of us. We're directly seating a world, a future, that we long for. So along with the magnitude of the,

the suffering. And this isn't a silver lining. This is just how the dialectic of spiritual unfolding happens. Along with the magnitude of the suffering, there's a potential for profound compassion, for a more compassionate world. So our inquiry tonight next week, and it may be for, I don't know how many weeks, haven't worked it out because everything's happening so fast. The inquiry is to see how can we respond to what's happening with loving, presence. And I'm calling these talks sheltering in love. Sheltering and that doesn't mean just what the person we're immediately sheltering with, but really sheltering with all of us in love. So we'll begin with how we shelter in love by bringing compassion to what's arising inside us,

love to that. And we'll extend it. We'll extend it out, widening circles, as we often do. In Buddhism, the response of compassion to the world is the center of what's called the Bodhisattva path. And that's the path of an awakening being. And each of you, you would not be listening, you would not be watching, you wouldn't be tuning in unless that bodhisattva being was waking up in you. And we all have a longing to live from love. It's in all of us. So on the bodhisattva path, the big inquiry is, you know, how do we experience the intensity of what's happening and be able to in the midst of it, have the courage to feel what's going on

and open our hearts? And what energizes the bodhisattva path, what energizes you on your spiritual path, is remembering that this matters, that this is what matters. right now, that through all of this, whatever's going on, ranging from inconvenience to sickness, to death, to financial devastation, what matters is can we relate with a quality of real presence and compassion inwardly into our world? That's what's going to transform life on earth. So we start, given that inquiry, with recognizing the universal tendency to react from fear. Because when life is scary and when it feels out of control, the most immediate reflex that comes from our survival brain.

And it's way quicker than what comes from our more recently involved brain. The quick thing that happens is reflex is it's kind of a limbic hijack, is that we just get the spike of fear. And some of you might be witnessing it in your own life right now, probably most of us. I know I am when it happened. I can just feel it. It's kind of like a seizure, you know. And fear spikes and the brain just goes onto kind of a permanent worry channel. Remember the word worry comes from strangle.

So you can just feel it. We go into a kind of frenzied self-protective mode or protecting those right cliques. closest into us, whether it's stocking up on goods or whatever. We get hooked on that fire hose of news that everybody talks about. And then often kind of restlessly seek distractions, the Netflix type thing, perceiving others as a potential carrier. So this fear reaction is speedier than a more evolved response. And it can take over.

So the first thing is just to recognize that and know that we're in good company. This is part of our human wiring. And then we start looking at, well, what else is possible? Well, we shift to more of a wakeful kind presence. When instead of seeking distraction, we pause. Starts with a pause and we're going to spend more time with that. We have to kind of pause and get quieter. deepen attention. And when we do that, when we deepen attention, we start activating the

prefrontal cortex. We start activating the parts of the brain that correlate with mindfulness, with compassion. We start perceiving connection. We start perceiving, oh, we're all in this. And our heart softens with that, with that connection. And our response to life becomes much more from caring and loving than the tightness of fear. So at this point, if we were in person right now, what I do is pause here and I'd ask for a hand raise because it helps me to sense what others are going through and really ask how many of you feel that this crisis has brought you closer with others, you know, even with the physical distancing, that there's just more connection.

And I asked this because I've been in touch with many, many people and seen how much it's happening all over. People are wondering how's another person doing. It just keeps coming up. Different people come to mind and people are reaching out. And the reaching out has a different quality because we're not habitual right now. this earthquake, this shaking up of the grounds, has in some way made it so we're not on automatic with each other quite so much. I mean, personality patterns set in pretty quickly, but there's more spontaneity and more

of a shared vulnerability and more tenderness. We're remembering how much people matter to us because who knows, it's really, amazing when we're not so sure that we've just going to go on forever, how much the cherishing wakes up in our hearts. So that's the possibility if there's a pause, then we start sensing what matters and there's more connecting, more reaching out, so many different forms of online connecting. We'll explore a little bit more of this next week, how we can deepen that and bring that to even more levels of authenticity and real nurturing.

But for now, just to say that when the ground shake, something does wake up for many of us. I saw a picture of a friend in Vermont, and I posted this on Facebook. He's 74, and the picture has him on his sewing machine making masks for health care workers, the support workers, not the doctors and nurses, because they need different kind of math. but how beautiful the 74-year-old guy just on his sewing machine. So let's look together, let's reflect together on what supports us in remembering love and expressing it and sheltering in love. And as I mentioned, all awakening, the whole Bodhisattva path,

comes out of that sacred pause where we interrupt our habitual patterns, which are so often fear-based. And then we have the option to respond and not react. So we'll look at responding to what's coming up inside us, pausing and being with our inner life. And I want to acknowledge that sometimes the image is given that we're all in these sheltering in these quiet sanctuaries and we have all this time now opened up for meditation and for, you know, nurturing our spiritual life.

and I'm well aware that for many, including myself, if ever it's busier, I mean, there's so much online activity, but there's not only work demands, many of children, many of the challenge of being sick or someone that they know is sick, some are quarantine. But whatever your circumstances, this truly can be a portal, a time that's a portal to steepening spirituality. and it's essential to nourish our inner lives right now, to take more time to be intimate and to listen inwardly. Sometimes our meditation or that inner listening will be a very simple way of touching peace. The meditation I led right before this talk really was intended as a way to touch natural great peace, using the breath, slowing it down, quieting the mind, just feeling a sense of beingness and learning to relax with the waves. And when we do that, we start appreciating the simple things

around us, just walking outside and looking at the blossoms or feeling the breeze on our face. We just open up. So that's one level of nourishing ourselves to quiet and and open. And given the fact that for many of us, a lot of waves are stirred up, where we might come and pause and what we get in touch with is not that wide expense of being this, but we feel the sense of the grip of fear in some way or anger, agitation, we need to be intimate with our inner life to process what's there. Because here's the thing.

if we keep distracting ourselves, if we don't process it, we'll feel not only disconnected from ourselves, but we won't actually be able to connect with others. And that's a kind of torment to really feel a sense of isolation and disconnection. So to process fear means to discover the ocean that can be with the waves, to have a refuge of love and presence is big enough to hold our life. And it's a blessing. And our pathway that we often explore together, and we'll go a little bit deeper with that tonight,

is using the mindfulness and compassion of the acronym Rain to have that intimacy with our inner life, to process the fear. Some of you are new to this, and some of you have probably been with me, you know, 100 times exploring the rain meditation. And I can say from my own experience, it doesn't matter. how many times you've done it, there's no limit to how tender the heart can become, and no limit to how vast the awareness can be. So you can keep deepening that pathway home. Rain, the acronym is recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And then there's some moments

of what's called after the rain where you actually rest in the presence. It's there. So some comments on rain, just hopefully that will be helpful to you, that recognizing and allowing can be quick. What's happening with recognizing and allowing is you're noticing, oh, okay, I'm caught, I'm stuck. You're recognizing that. And it helps to even name a little bit the fear or the anger whatever's predominant because, and I've mentioned this before, the activity of mental noting, by naming it, you actually reduce the grip of it. It quiets down the limbic system. It starts waking up the frontal cortex. So name what you're noticing. Okay, fear, fear. And then allow it.

And allowing doesn't mean this complete opening and surrendering to the the moment, we can't, we can't will that. But here's what we can do with allowing, we can be willing to pause and just let it be there for a bit. We can be willing to not try to fix, not to leave and distract, but just to let what's here be here. For me, the kind of most powerful way of allowing is just to say this belongs. This wave of the ocean belongs. So, whatever you're feeling, whether it's restlessness or agitation or wired or depressed or angry, just to name it and let it be there for a little bit. That's the allowing. And then investigating. With fear, the most important, and this is actually with all emotions, but with fear for sure,

you want to find it in the body. And so just the question, where am I feeling this? Where am I feeling this? And how does it feel? And I'm touching my chest or my heart because often for me it's a kind of clenching in this area. It helps to put your hand where you feel it. One, because the attention is so distractible that if you put your hand there, it'll help you to continue investigating in a really honest and clear way. But secondarily, investigating needs to be gentle.

And the touch actually begins to bring in the all-important nurturing that makes healing possible. So come into the body and feel it there. As we say often, our issues are in our tissues. If we want to heal, we have to feel what's here. The final question when we're investigating is, what is this vulnerable place most need? And it's an important question just to ask and listen so that we're feeling right into the epicenter of what's there and asking right where we feel most vulnerable, what is this need?

And fear will always need some form of safety and love. It comes in different ways. But in some way we're going to be bringing some sense of that the fear belongs to something larger. I was doing some rain with a doctor who's encountering huge stress and anxiety at her hospitals. You can imagine all the hospitals everywhere. And when I was doing rain with her and she got to investigate, she could feel her throat really tight. And you could hear her voice. It went higher because of the tightness in her throat. And I said to feel right into the epicenter. And it was really a stranglehold in her throat. And then I said, so what does that

vulnerable place and you need. And she said, it just needs me to accept that it's here. So for her, nurturing was lightly touching her throat with Karen saying, you belong, it's okay that you're here. It's okay that you're here. And she said that as she had her kind of repeated as a just a gentle, kind whisper, a number of times, she could literally feel that strangling and not, it kind of loosened in just more space.

The fear didn't disappear, but there's just more space. Everybody that is practicing rain needs to customize and find the nurturing that most serves. It really, really addresses and brings care to what's here. I shared with you in the last class that when I was, doing rain when I first really felt the intensity of agitation around this pandemic. And I went right to the epicenter of it, kind of this surrendering presence, just feeling this kind of sharp edge of pain right in my heart area. Then I said, what does this need? And it just needed loving.

It needed to feel belonging to something larger. And for me, I just sensed the love that pervades this universe. I just imagined and sensed it and imagined it pouring in and kind of bathing and permeating the fear. And I sometimes get questions, you know, well, I can't imagine that. Or when I try to just call on loving awareness, you know, it doesn't work. So I want to comment on that. It only really works to call on love or to offer. offer love or compassion to ourselves if we have really fully contacted the vulnerability. That's the prerequisite sort of to compassion. Compassion arises out of feeling the vulnerability.

And you might envision it like a tree with these roots, you know, in the earthiness. So when we root deep into the earthiness of our feelings and emotions and really touch them, then the branches of the tree can reach to the heavens and take in the healing light and the love. We have to be rooted in our bodies and in the vulnerability. So if you feel like you're doing rain but you're offering care or calling on care but it doesn't, it feels abstract, take some more time to investigate and feel into, well, what's the worst part of this? And how is it feeling in my body? and what does it really need and really get in touch with the vulnerability.

Now, of course, the caveat always is with rain. If it's trauma, if there's trauma, just take some time to nurture without trying to go into the vulnerability. Use the breath to calm you. Take the time you need to actually soothe the sympathetic nervous system. So there's enough safety, enough balance to even be. able to be mindful of what's happening and not re-trigger trauma. That's always the caveat. But if it's not trauma, then to feel right into the epicenter, to have that courage to feel what's here, to breathe with it, and then to invite love to wash through. And it can be your own love,

that you offer a tender message to yourself, whatever you most imagine will comfort, as this doctor did. you belong, it's okay that you're here and just really that felt sense of care, offering that to yourself, you might imagine as I do a larger source. It might be that you have a sense of a loving being that you trust and that you trust cares for you and you imagine the gaze in their eyes and the love that comes through them and just feel that their love is washing through your hand into your heart. It takes practice. If you've done it once or twice and found that it wasn't working, keep going.

The reason it works is because if you really start imagining what you're longing for, it brings it alive. I'll give you an example. One friend described how when she's feeling that vulnerability and reaches out, She imagines and senses a warm presence embracing her and she feels like it's swaddling her, holding her as if she's an infant. So that's the longing. It's like this very young place that wants to feel swaddled and held and she imagines it or imagines being hugged or embraced by a loved one. For others, it might be a person that's no longer alive. It might be you imagine a spiritual figure. For one, it was this sense of being held in the heart of the Buddha.

So again, why does this work? Why would it work for you to imagine some great formless loving light washing through you? And research has found that whatever we imagine, whether it's our tennis serve, like in our minds eye we're going through a tennis serve, or we imagine being hugged, it activates the brain. and the brain experiences as if it's actually happening. And the whole body experiences the whatever's imagined as real. It's just as if when you're dreaming and you have a dream that's really happy or really sad,

you can wake up crying. Well, it was a dream. It was something imagined in your mind and yet it totally changed the whole experience through your body and mind. If you can imagine something, like just imagine it. a loving, spacious, formless energy that is embracing you. If you can imagine that, it means the seeds of that experience are already within you. And you can imagine it.

Napoleon Hill says, whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. So, my friends, I'm taking some time with this piece because there's a real power to your imagination. And if you're feeling stuck in fear and you want to be able to heal the fear, you need to love yourself into healing. And we can do that by imagining our own awakened heart holding ourselves. And that's quite beautiful.

You can imagine your bodhisattva evolved, awakened being just in some way energetically, bringing tenderness right to the young part of your being, pouring it in. But if that's difficult, and sometimes it is, because sometimes we feel so young and so regress, we don't have access to our future self, that which we're evolving into. We don't sense that inner bodhisattva in those moments. In those moments, explore reaching out to something larger. the suffering of fear is a sense of separation and if you can imagine something larger

then you can begin to reconnect you can begin to have a sense of belonging so I invite you to practice it and not just once practice it regularly I can share in my own life that once I started discovering that pathway For me it's reaching out to the beloved in some way a sense of the love in this universe. And in some ways a sense of kind of bowing my head and letting that loving energy wash through.

Sometimes I imagine kind of a kiss or a blessing on the brow. When I started doing that and sensing that the power of imagining actually brought to life the sense of being absolutely held and then a kind of dissolving into that loving awareness, being that loving awareness, I started doing it all the time. And so now, even as I talk to you about it, I can feel and sense energetically that loving presence and relax and open into it. And it's just, as with all neuropathways, the more we use them, the more strong and alive they become. So I'm emphasizing this in the time of pandemic

because we're bodhisattvas that are unfolding and we need to use our imagination. We need to water the seeds of the awakened heart however we can. Now I'll mention one more pathway to loving presence. This is still the end of rain. It still has to do with nurturing. And it's a version of imagining. And this is to actually articulate as a prayer what you're longing for.

So if you're stuck in fear, if you're stuck in grief, to actually from that vulnerable place, from the roots of the tree, just reach out and ask for what you want. I have many times in my life just whispered, please love me, from a very small regressed blaze. And the yearning actually brings a kind of porousness or receptivity that allows the nurturing of the universe to fill us. Prayer is powerful. John O'Donohue, who's past, who I just love his teachings and his poems. he says that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.

Prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. The healing that can come from this pandemic is to trust our belonging. So when we do rain and we nurture, we are deepening that trust. Finally, in rain, I want to kind of emphasize this because often it's skipped over after you've recognized and allowed and you've investigated and felt into the roots of the vulnerability and you've offered care or brought it in with nurturing. After the rain is when you stop doing and just notice the presence that's here. notice what shifted.

When we start rain, it's because we're stuck in a kind of separate scared self. Notice in after the rain, who's here? Because what you'll find, and it may not be complete. I'm going to take a pause. I hear I'm talking about inviting you to listen inwardly, and I'm kind of overriding my own body and losing my voice. little. So my friends, after the rain, take your time in it. Notice the shift from where you started, even if it's just a little bit, to more of a sense of presence, more open-hearted, more tender.

The reason it's so important to notice all that is because you start to trust that the presence and the love is more the truth of who you are than any of the stories, any of the changing ways of experience. And that's where the freedom comes. We started tonight talking sheltering in love. You know, how do we really become the bodhisattva, offering love to our inner life, love to others? And it comes from trusting our belonging, trusting this, goodness of presence and love that really is a kind of shared field. So that even as you're listening right now, if you use your imagination,

which again comes from the seeds of truth, you'll sense a lot of people also listening and reflecting around the globe. A lot of people who like you are feeling a range of emotions of difficult waves of experience, perhaps really intense fear, or maybe some sense of waiting like something is about to happen that's scary. But you'll sense that we're all experiencing these waves of difficulty and that in the background behind, you know, the thoughts and the feelings, there's a presence, a witnessing presence, a tender presence.

that's really a field of belonging that we're all a part of. We can trust and live from that. That's the invitation of the Bodhisattva path. I'd like to close with a short meditation with you to just open us into that and know that we'll be back together on this live stream next week to explore more about how we can shelter in love, how we can wake up that loving, how we can manifest as bodhisattvas and really move through the most difficult time in this lifetime for most of us in a way that can

create a more loving world. That's the hope. Please, if you will, take a few moments to close your eyes. Take a few nice full deep breaths and then letting the breath resume in its natural rhythm. Take a moment to scan through your body and let go of any obvious

tightness or tension that might have just automatically set itself up in your body as you were listening. Maybe softening the shoulders and the hands, loosening the belly, relaxing your heart.

sensing that image of being part of a whole web of beings who are reflecting, waking up together. You might sense the challenging waves that you've experienced in these last days, today, most recently. And as you do, sense your deepest aspiration, how do you want to be relating to the life? that's unfolding inside you. How do you want to relate to the life around you? What is that you want to commit your heart to in the days and weeks and months to come? And whatever the language, the words,

our feelings that are there, just feel your sincerity and feel the goodness that comes knowing how many of us, how many of us, are feeling that sincere longing to in some way bring more love into the world. And from that space, that heart space, again, sense the waves going on in this particular body mind.

What's been catching you? Where have you felt stuck? The pathway to awakening our heart is really loving ourselves into healing. What wants inclusion right now? What have you been maybe judging or pushing away or not attending to? Taking these moments to honestly recognize what's here, what wants attention, to let it be here. Just you might even whisper, this belongs. It's a wave in the ocean. And sense all of us feeling those waves and allowing, making room.

that we're in it together. And as you feel the particular waves in your body, mind, it might help to put your hand wherever you're feeling vulnerability or whatever wants attention, just placing your hand, perhaps your throat or your heart or billy, experimenting to let the touch be most tender. And from the wisest, most awake part of your being or from the wisdom and love in the universe,

sensing what message right this moment might most bring healing and inner freedom. And sensing in these moments as you offer a message and then sit quietly, the possibility of truly bathing in love whatever most needs attention, sensing the possibility of just relaxing open and being that loving presence, sensing the heart space, the shared heart space, the loving presence that we all share that holds these waves of our humanness, knowing that as your true belonging. You belong to this heart space and there's room for these waves. With the waves of pain and sorrow and beauty and wonder, there's room. This is our refuge, this heart's face. Know it as your true home. I'd like to close tonight with a favorite poem from

the poet Mark Nipo. Everything is beautiful and I'm so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we've lost face each other. And it is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. It is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything.

I am so sad and everything is beautiful. Thank you, my friends, for being part of this. Please be well, be safe. Take good care of yourself and each other. We'll see each other and be with each other next week. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

please visit tarabrock.com.