Tara Brach - Sheltering In Love (Part 3) (2020-04-08)

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Sheltering In Love (Part 3) (2020-04-08) - 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.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and greetings, my friends. Each day, more and more people around the globe are sheltering at home and it comes with many levels of threats and losses, including not knowing if when things will end and if it's going to be a new normal and what will that be like. So collectively we're feeling the magnitude of this challenge that's painfully moving across our planet. And just on the lighter side of this, I thought I'd say that I'm reminded of George Carlin saying, to ever get that strange feeling of Vosier Day. Not deja vu, Vosier Day.

It's a distinct sense that somehow something has just happened that's never happened before and nothing feels familiar. And then suddenly the feeling's gone. Vujaday. So that's one description of our experience these days. This talk is entitled Sheltering in Love Part 3. I may stop numbering them because I'm not really sure how many parts.

We may just keep going until we start being out there in the world circulating again. We'll see. But the intention of our shared reflection is this. It's to explore how during these times of so much suffering we can remember to take presence in refuge and in love. And the understanding is, that it's during difficult times, times when there's a huge disruption in our life habits, that can bring out really both our most regressed primitive nature and also our most evolved being.

And we can see it societally that as this happens, all the inequities of our society are brought out, that those who are poor, those of non-dominant race, and I'm thinking right now particularly of the African Americans, the United States, who are contracting the virus and dying at alarming rates, those who are most vulnerable really get hurt in the most deep ways. And of course, the financial devastation. Those that have less money often are the ones that can't work from home. They can't shelter easily. Also, on a societal level, we're seeing the beauty and goodness of people's arts,

this widespread caring, people volunteering to step into the front line. Now I'm thinking of the retired health workers that have been asked to step in again, risk their lives. So the most regressed and the most evolved. And of course, we're watching it in ourselves on an individual level that what's going on can trigger our deepest fears for survival. And it leaves us in this kind of reactive trance. and we can see it sometimes after the fact more than when we're in it where we're playing out

all of our most addictive patterns. People have been sharing with me how they're caught in controlling and in blame and then in self-judgment. So it can call that forward, our most primitive brain and also our love, our creativity, our wisdom, really who we most want to be. So what's natural as we reflect together is really honoring that there's forgetting and getting caught in the trance and remembering, reopening, and we're all in that process. So maybe here we'll pause and reflect as we often do when we're together. And this is a reflection if it helps to close your eyes. But without any judgment, just to look at today and sense

what was today like? Where do you sense just in a brief review of the last hours where you were in some sort of a trance where you were tight, fearful, reactive? And where do you notice over these last hours when you felt a kind of remembrance, a kindness, a caring, a presence?

And as you bear witness, just the recent past, just feel your sincerity right now asking yourself, well, what is my deepest intention? How do I want to be living through this? What do I want really called forth from me? What parts of me? You might widen now your reflection,

just feeling all of us around the globe together, reflecting, all of us experiencing the realness of fear and how it can sometimes be overwhelming, how we can be reactive, also all of us having that yearning and we each have our own language for it, but in some way to find an inner refuge of peace and love and to live from that love, to live from our hearts. Last week I shared that beautiful inquiry by Dorothy Day after she was witnessing all the kindnesses as people emerged from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and she asked that question, why why can't we live this way all the time?

And it feels like a powerful question. Exploring together, what helps us remember more regularly to open our hearts to ourselves, to each other? So when we talk about sheltering in love, which is really living from an awake heart, there are two pathways that we can find in most contemplative traditions, and that's that's how I'm kind of organizing this reflection tonight. And they're both very clear trainings on a path of awareness. And the first is awakening through a mindful kind presence.

In other words, going right to what's true and real in the moment. And this is often described as the recognize and allow in rain, recognizing and allowing the present moment's experience, opening to what is. The second pathway is intentionally turning our attention towards something that we love, towards goodness, towards what we appreciate. And this includes the nurturing of rain. In Buddhism, it's often described as gladdening the mind. So these are the two pathways coming right into presence and gladdening the mind.

And for the last couple of weeks, we've been exploring the first pathway and looking at how we can really open to the vulnerability that's here. The understanding being that unless we contact vulnerability and have that courage to really connect with it, we can't really awaken compassion. So contacting the vulnerable opens us. And we are witnessing this. so many of us in our own lives that the moments that we do get really present, we get more tender. I was working with a friend of the family. Her son has contracted coronavirus, and so she's really gripped by fears for him, for the rest of the family. So I invited her to get still and to feel the fear in her body, to recognize and allow it, to really be with it. She had her

hand on her heart and I invited her to send some kindness in. And the message that she sent was, thank you for trying to protect me. I'm all right right now and I'm doing all I can. I feel like that's a really important message and for her it created quite a shift to appreciate the intention of the fear. Our fear and our vulnerability, the experience is life trying to protect itself. life-loving itself. And there's a wisdom and a transformation that happens when we can simply recognize that and honor it. So for her sending that message, thank you. Thank you for trying to protect me. I'm okay right now. I'm doing okay. We're doing what we can. Created kind of a shift from a scared, powerless parent, in other words, who was inside the fear, to a much more spacious

presence, really living from her awake heart, holding the fear. This is the shift of freedom that we discover with mindfulness, a movement from being inside the wave that's so intense, to being the ocean that can include the wave. And for her, she then found that she was holding her family and herself and her heart in a way that there was a lot more inner freedom. I have to say that for myself, and I share this because really I think everyone I know has more fear than they're used to, every day I am bringing the mindfulness and compassion of rain to the fears that arise for family and close in circles and all the others that I hear about and know. And so I touch it. I just kind of commend.

admit myself, okay, feel it, feel it, hold it with compassion. And the shift, which is so powerful with that presence, is a movement that makes it so clear when I become the ocean holding the waves that the waves are really not my fear, but the world's fear. And I wanted to re-emphasize this because in the moments that you're really present with something and not reacting to it, it becomes clear, it's not so personal. You really are, as they say, like the goddess of the universe, the god of the universe holding the pain of the world in your heart. You've become very large. They say that personal pain is the portal to the universal. So I invite you to explore this and just explore how that mindful presence with fear actually awakens

and frees the heart. Now, the caveat that I'll say is that it takes patience and it takes practice, which of course brings up another line from George Garland, which is, I'm not into working out. My philosophy is no pain, no pain. So it takes a kind of willingness to contact vulnerability, and we all have the conditioning to move in the other direction. So, this is where the training comes in, that out of a deep inner wisdom inside you, you know that if you can commit yourself to stay, to touch with kindness what's here, there's going to be some freedom. I'll share with you a poem, my friend and poet, Dana Feld's right, and she actually had just visited me, and then we had spent some time together, and this is what she wrote.

first reaction. She says, being only human, my first reaction to the out-of-control nature of this moment is fear or the low-grade gut clench of anxiety. My practice now is turning toward fear, not away, saying, I'm with you in this. Together we can face what comes. If I can summon up a second reaction of love, clear seeing, acceptance, or compassion, That's how I grow, right in the midst of the unknown. So our first pathway, I'm doing a bit of review on pathway number one, is that brave presence that we bring right to what's going on here, and that allows us then to regard with compassion,

that allows us to become the ocean holding the waves. The second pathway. And I move us on to this second pathway, pathway of gladdening the mind because the first pathway of presence with the vulnerability is necessary but not sufficient. And I love the way Ticknacht Han, Zen master Ticknodhan puts it. He says it's not enough to suffer. We must also touch peace. We must also remember beauty, goodness. Now we often talk about our inbuilt negativity bias. how our survival brains tend to remember and build beliefs around what goes wrong and to forget

the goodness. And the examples often given are if you have 99 interactions with dogs and they're all wonderful and then one dog is nasty and bites, what do you remember? And what do you build your beliefs around and what does your body's fear focus on? Well, we know. And I can say for myself, if I give a talk and I get feedback and six people tell me how much what I said resonated or touched them and one person remarks on my corny humor, what do I remember? You know, we're Velcro for bad and Teflon for good, as my good buddy Rick Hansen puts it. So our negativity bias, what it does, and this is just part of the survival brain, is it narrows the aperture of our attention.

So we're actually scanning for what's wrong. We're looking for trouble. We're anxiety looking for a place to land. And when that's our mode, and it's how it is a lot of the time, and particularly when we're in times like this where the world's really falling apart around us, we miss out on the beauty that's right here, on that new, that lime green new leaf on the trees or on the caring of so many, we miss out.

So one way to understand it is that the spiritual path is awakening to reality, which includes both the vulnerability that we live with and the beauty and the goodness. and it's critical to remember what we're forgetting because it gives us resilience, it gives us perspective, it gives us hope. So many people that I'm in touch with during this crisis are getting that sense of gratitude for what they do cherish. One person wrote, I'm appreciating all the things I took for granted. I see the blue sky. I hear the bird song. I feel the cool wind and I taste whatever food I cook for myself with so much gratitude. I have so much respect for everyone working hard out there right now. For most of us, it takes intention to undo the negativity bias.

that it's an actual formal part of our meditation practice. It takes training to gladden the mind. So we'll look together for the duration of this time that we're here at a few domains of gladdening the mind. And keep in mind the way that it actually transforms us is the same with each, that when we actually have an experience that's positive where the mind gets gladden,

we need to stay with it for a certain amount of time. Our tendency when something good happens is to experience it, but then go right back into whatever's next on our to-do list or whatever we're worried about. So it actually takes intention to stay, to say, okay, stay. This allows us in terms of neuropsychology

to install the state in our implicit awareness. You have to kind of focus on that positive experience for 15 to 30 seconds. It could be three to five long breaths and we're going to practice this together. But I want to kind of put that out there because that's what I mean by actually being a practice. Okay, the first of the domains that we're going to be exploring is the one I mentioned earlier, gratitude. And I won't say this is true for everybody. I can say for myself, I'm well aware of my inner complainer, the one that's kind of griping about, you know, the creaky knees or when I feel like my ears are clogged up or the little stuff that just I just get into complaining mode.

And most people I know have a tendency to get tense when they feel like. life isn't cooperating and kind of narrow down. So to decondition, we practice gratitude. And there's been a lot of research. It's wonderful on gratitude in recent years. This one piece of research was now quite a while ago by Seligman. He took a group of severely depressed people and he had them write down three good things that happened to them. And he'd had them do it each day for 15 days. And at the end, 92% felt an increase in happiness. If you want to train yourself, it can help to have a gratitude partner. And all you do is email at the end of the day. You don't even have to say hi-so. And so just list your three things. My husband and I, when we sit together

at the end of the sit and we have some meditative sharing, the first thing we share with each other is what we're grateful for. Even if you don't have a gratitude partner, just write it down somewhere or build it into your own meditation. It's so powerful. And even when life is more difficult, as it is for many right now, it's really all in how we frame it. Because if you think of people you know who are grateful, you can sense an inner freedom, a kind of pure state that moves through all different types of circumstances. I'll share with you one of the stories that I most love illustrating this a bit.

In this story, a man named Kabir was a shoemaker, not well off in any way, a very simple man. He worked, and as he worked, he'd always repeat the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. And it was his way of kind of honoring and celebrating the divine, because Ram's a word for the divine, day in and day out. He did it for 20 years and then one day Rahm appeared and Kabir said well who are you and Ram said well I'm Ram said well I'm Ram said why are you here and Ram said why am I here you've been

calling me for years and now I've come what do you want and Kabir said I don't want anything Ram said what why have you been repeating my name Kabir said I just love repeating your name and then for years to come wherever Kabir would go, he'd be followed by Ram and the sound, Kabir, Kabir, Kabir, Kabir. And you can feel in that, that there is such a blessing, such a sweetness in gratitude. And we know it. The moments that we feel grateful or appreciative, we feel like we're kind of back home in a childlike purity or innocence, it's so sweet. There's a real inner freedom. The mystic and Catholic priest, Unre Nguyen, writes this.

He says, the choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious. So let me pause here and invite you into a short reflection, if you will. Here we are. we're training in gladdening the mind. And you might close your eyes, take a few full breaths. And now let the breath be felt in the area of the heart as you breathe. As if you could breathe in and touch the heart with your breath, breathe out, let it flow

through your heart. And then begin to scan your life, sensing what you're grateful for. And you might whisper out loud, um, great. to or I'm grateful for and then fell in the blanks and just say it over and over again, whispering your gratitude for whatever comes up. And now sensing what you have included as what you're grateful for and bring you to mind one person where you can really feel a real full sense of appreciation. sense what you're grateful for. And you might mentally whisper their name or actually whisper out

loud and say the words thank you. And then paying attention to your heart, feel the experience of gratitude itself as a felt sense. Allow it to fill you. Let it be as big as it is. You might breathe with it. Discover what it feels like when you let it really fill your whole body and heart and being. It helps to keep an image of the person you're grateful to or something about your life you're grateful to to keep reminding you. That's great. Long, deep breaths, feeling the felt sense of gratitude in your body and your heart. And just sense who you are when you're feeling grateful.

Notice the space, the tenderness of your being beyond any story of self. Okay. Opening your eyes. So the first domain of training our attention, gladdening the mind is gratitude. The second is savoring. And this is what happens, as I mentioned, when something pleasurable occurs, when we see some beauty, because of the negativity bias, we skim over it. We don't linger.

We don't loiter. We don't take in the good. So it's a real practice to pause in the moments that spontaneously we do have something wonderful, something pleasant, something beautiful happen. Emerson writes, or actually he asked this, he asked, what will we do if the stars only came out once every thousand years? He says, no one would sleep that night, of course, we would be ecstatic, made rapturous by the glory of the divine and yet the magic of our world

is so easy to skim over I mean think of it for most of us as Emerson really is pointing to the pleasure and beauty is really accessible the pleasure of the sound of rain the moon going in and out of the clouds the laughter of someone we love something funny

you know it's pleasure happens, but do we pause and let ourselves take it in? So again, I want to invite you as kind of a commitment to gladdening the mind, to opening to the part of reality we tend to ignore, when, because as they say, where the attention goes, energy flows, when something beautiful happens, take those three to five breaths and just take it in. I had one of those notable experiences yesterday. I was in the woods doing my morning walk towards the river and an owl landed in a nearby branch. And of course it was extra special because I usually don't see owls in the morning. And not only that, he hung out enough for me to pull out my iPhone and take a picture,

terrible picture, but take a picture and just kind of vibe with him. And then, you know, he sailed that silent sailing, you know, right past me moving away. And, just to breathe and sense, okay, this is the magic of our world right here. The poet Kabir says, every leaf teaches the Dharma, teaches the path. So as we unlearn this habit of tumbling into the future, savoring can become this natural response to goodness. And you might pause here again. let's just take a brief reflection, because the only way these things actually work is if you

explore them and practice them, you might close your eyes again and scan the last day or two for something that you either savored or that you might have savored, some moment that matter to, that had some goodness, some love, some beauty, some simple sweetness to it. that you either savored or you might have savored. And if it's something that repeats in your life, you might flag it. And even more, just to sense your intention for pausing, for taking in the good. It's a real gift to yourself and to others. Okay, so we've talked about gratitude, about savoring.

The third domain to glad in the mind is serving, which actually feels good when we're serving. There's actual oxytocin that flows through us. It connects us with others. You know, when we're unhappy, there's a sense of being locked into self-centeredness. It's not a healthy self-care. It's a self-centeredness that focuses on a not-okay self. And the narrative is really all about what I'm afraid of, what I need, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with others. But it reinforces separateness. So serving, and even if it's somewhat mechanical to begin with, in some way helping or extending

ourselves to others, is a powerful way to decondition that self-centeredness. It actually opens us to feeling better. And I'll make a note before continuing about service, and that is that it's easy when we start talking about helping others to evoke the trance of service. unworthiness. And I know this. I know this in myself. If I'm in certain moods and people are talking about all those that are doing heroic things or stepping forward and, you know, it's very easy to start feeling diminished. And I just in recent days talked to several people that were caught in this right in these days feeling I'm not doing enough. So if talking about

serving brings up that sense of falling short, let your first step in serving be serving your inner life with a message of love. Even if you're not in the mood, in some way extend a message of care because if you do, it'll free you to help plant seeds of love throughout the world. We always have to start with ourselves in some way. So serving. There's all these different ways we can do it. It doesn't have to be grandiose. It can be a smile. It can be a wave. It can be a kind to email, a call. It can be making masks. It can be being on the front lines as a provider in some way. But it's expressing care. I think in the deepest way often it's being a mirror of goodness, reminding people that they're intrinsically good and valued.

So during this crisis in particular, there are many ways to reach out and extend our care. And before we continue too much on serving, I thought I'd share a few wise quotes from children about serving. One little girl writes, when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. I remember I first heard that when I thought how quaint and cute and now I can relate to it. Okay, another child. Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs.

Another. I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones. I thought that was cute. Another. You really shouldn't say I love you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget and it's good for them to get reminded. Okay, last one. This is Tom, age seven. Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work. I thought that was really prescient and that you might appreciate that. So the bottom line is serving, the attitude behind serving does connect us. It opens us up, and it's one of those things you can do outside in, that even when you're not feeling that benevolent, or generous, just to engage actually opens you up into that field of caring.

One of my favorite stories by the poet Naomi Nye, it's kind of an essay, but I thought I'd read it to you because it brings a spirit into what I feel we're all together trying to do in this world, creating more love. And she says this, she says, wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal. After learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate 4A understands Arabic, please come. Well, this was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly help. So the flight service person said, talk to her, what's her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did

this. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. Shuddaa, Shubiduk, Abiti, Stanishu, Men Vadlique, Shubid sui, the minute she heard any word she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, you're fine. You'll get there. Who's picking you up? Let's call them. called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and I would ride next to her southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course,

they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it, why not call up some of my Palestinian poet friends and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade Mamul cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds, stuffed with dates and nuts out of her bag, and was offering them to all of us at the gate. To my amazement, no one declined. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo, were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling. There's no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free beverages from

huge coolers and two young children from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too and I noticed my new best friend by now we were holding hands had a potted plant poking out of her bag some medicinal thing with green furry leaves such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in, the shared world.

Not a single person this gate once the crying of confusion stopped seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those others too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything. not everything is lost. There's this possibility we have when things fall apart

about being really conscious in our caring, in our reaching out, sending we really are trying to create the world that we believe in. Serving gladdens the mind. We remember our belonging to each other. So like gratitude with serving, if you feel the good feelings that come from it and pause and train. In other words, let them get installed. It actually creates a pathway that makes serving more and more a natural way to extend your heart.

So with that, my friends, let's do another reflection, a brief one. I invite you to close your eyes. And again, take a moment to arrive right here. Feeling your breath. Feeling your body. your heart. And I invite you to bring to mind in the last few days or week or two some way that you might have served someone else, some act of kindness, perhaps mirroring their goodness, being friendly. And if one doesn't come easy to mind, imagine one that might occur in the next few days.

and as you do either remember a past event or imagine one that could come sense the other person relieved helped happier and as you sense the other person in some way feeling lifted up some just feel in your own being the gratitude for that the goodness of that just breathe with that again from on re new one every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I'm moving from fear to love. So gladdening our mind, all the ways of remembering our connection, our love,

when things fall apart, really the answer to most questions is love. It's the only thing that makes sense. So whether it's gladdening the mind with gratitude or with sense, savoring, or offering our care to others, it's the response to things falling apart that can create the world that we believe in. So tonight, this class, sheltering in love, kind of looked at both pathways, the pathway of opening directly to vulnerability, our own, others with compassion, and then gladdening the mind, remembering what we love. And just to say, again, Again, we need both so that we can live from a wholeness of heart and spirit.

Nost writes, Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break, and all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you. You might close your eyes for a few moments. We'll end as we opened. Inviting you to connect with your deepest aspiration,

feeling what's most sincere in you right this moment. What do you want called forth in you? Can you imagine in the next day or a few days what it might be like, how that might manifest. We close feeling our shared prayer as we shelter in love. May we connect with the presence that's always and already here, the tenderness of heart, the openness of heart, the wisdom of heart, and together may we create a more loving world. Blessings, my friends, take good, good care. Be safe. Be well, and I look forward to being with you next week. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

please visit tarabrak.com.