Tara Brach - Sheltering In Love - Part 4 (2020-04-15)

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Sheltering In Love - Part 4 (2020-04-15) - 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. Part 4 explores how the difficult emotions we all face can become direct portals to an inner refuge of sacred space.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. So a deep namaste and welcome my friends to another week of our sheltering in love talks and reflections and this time together has become an ongoing inquiry about really taking refuge in love during this time of global crisis. And I thought I'd begin with a story that I read. It took place in Cape Town, South Africa. Leaders from two different gangs contacted a pastor that had been working with the gangs and let the pastor know that they were really hungry. They were starving. Their groups needed food. And he called them together, these two plus other

gang leaders and they were able to create a truce and all the gang leaders were organized then to distribute food together to their extended communities. And you could see in the video these guys and they're bumping elbows and kind of, you can see a kind of joyfulness, this novel camaraderie that they were feeling and when they were interviewed they admitted they never in a million years could have imagined that this would be happening. but you could tell they were feeling good about themselves. And the pastor basically said that he could now die a happy man. And so, in a way, if we're cynical about it,

or even if we think realistic, will these guys return to their rivalry and violence afterwards? Maybe, possibly. I mean, it's deeply identified this us against them, and it gives them a kind of belief. longing, a meaningfulness, a sense of power. Yet, I wanted to share it because as I was watching, I could feel this kind of surge in my own feelings of this possibility, wow, these men could be brothers, these young guys could be brothers, and this longing I have for reconciliation that I know

we share because we love love. And when people come together after separation, there's such a a feeling of tenderness and healing. And the teaching is really that suffering is that we have forgotten our belonging to each other. So times of pandemic, they really highlight both our primitive psyche, where we're identified as this separate self that needs to fight and defend and conquer others and power over to this full potential of heart where we can serve the greater good. We know our togetherness. And if we take a moment right now and just sense ourselves and our society, we can see both. We can see the undercurrent of how much the fear and the loneliness and the depression really grabs and causes suffering. And when we're in the

primitive psyche, we turn against ourselves. We turn against our own being and self-judgment, feelings of unworthiness. There's been a real increase in the use of drugs and alcohol. We also violate others. There's this a real increase in domestic violence and there's been attacks on Asian Americans, those in power using language like a Chinese flu. This is the primitive mind. So I'm thinking in the United States of how the generations of racial violence and oppression have led to this virus taking such a huge proportion of African American lives. It's unequal access to care. So no question. A crisis can reveal and kind of shine a light on the shadow of the psyche. And we're also watching, and I know so many of you

were aware of this possibility of living from our most awake being, where there's, with all the upheaval, a sense of real gratitude for what we do have and a savouring of moments and more presence and more loving. And we're seeing daily millions of people in real voluntary ways, acts of generosity that are just so touching. So the inquiry here, for us, what determines in any moment whether we contract into a fear reactivity or whether we respond from love? And it's inevitable that difficult emotions arise. That's just a given for us. But what I want to explore for the rest of our time this evening is how each of us can work with the difficult emotions that arise

so that we are able to respond to our world from love and not from fear. And there's four key elements that I'll be reviewing. And one that makes a radical difference is how we're in relationship with fear, what's our attitude. The second is how do we step out of thoughts? The third, how do we really feel what's here? and then the fourth will be turning toward love. And I start with attitude because our habitual attitude when fear arises is that something bad is happening.

And I'd like to draw on Tibetan art and mythology a bit for a moment because there's such a difference and such a wisdom in relating to the painful emotions. and you'll see in Tibetan art what are called animal-headed deities. And you can see them at the entry to temples, and you can see them around the tankas, these pictures of spiritual images and mandalayas and the masks. And the animal-headed deities are really the limbic energies of fear and anger and hatred and shame and passion.

that are part of all of us. And they're considered an integral part of the spiritual path. An integral part of the spiritual path. They're supposed to arise and how we relate to them determines whether we can move into sacred space. And how we relate in all the, both Western and Eastern, psychology is if we can relate with presence.

If we can go through the animal-headed deities versus being at war with them or ignoring them. So I'm going to slow down a moment and say, well, why would a fearful animal deity be part of the sacred? And the understanding is that when we experience emotional pain, it's a sign that there's some obstacle present to feeling our belonging, our unity, our connection to our connection to our. the world. And it's an intelligent energy. All emotions are intelligent that are in some way asking for our attention. In other words, it's intention, which is really loving. This is every difficult emotion has an intention to in some way help us avoid the loss of connection

and to move us towards belonging. So think of it. Fear wants to protect us from loss, from injury, Anger wants to remove obstacles to our well-being, to flourishing. Depression wants to help protect us from the rawness of pain and shame wants to help us to avoid getting kicked out of our belonging, our societal belonging. And they may be misguided and we might have the on button pressed, you know, too consistently on some of them, but they still have a good intention. I'm going to read to you from what you of my favorite spiritual teachers. This is Srinar Sargadata who says that love wants growth,

the widening and deepening of consciousness and being. Whatever prevents that becomes a cause of pain and love does not shrink from pain. Whatever prevents our belonging becomes a cause for pain. It's like the cocoon when there's that metamorphosis, the cocoon that's too small and there's a need to break out of it. And that's pain when there's that pressure of too small a cocoon. So love forces us to pay attention to that pain. So, just to sum up, all difficult emotions have intelligence. They have a positive intention. and if our attitude is to get rid of them, then we're at war with ourselves.

But if instead we appreciate the intention and we bring presence to it. One of my friends describes it when she gets angry that Buddha mind is angry today. You know, that we give it a kind of presence, then we can move through to sacred space. Now I want to acknowledge it's not easy because when there's strong unpleasantness like fear, the reflex is to push it away or we get into bargaining mind like, okay, I'll be with you if you'll go away. But it knows. So we really have to, from our heart sincerely to these animal deities say, okay, I'm going to be really wakeful and present with you. and let me invite you just to practice for a moment because there's something really beautiful

as we shift our attitude towards difficult emotions and you might close your eyes for a moment and bring up a recent situation where you found fear was triggered or anger or hurt one of the animal-headed deities and when you get in touch with it since the emotion that came up and just ask with real interest and curiosity, so what would be the most positive intention of this? What's this emotion trying to do for me? If it's fear, is it trying to protect you from something in particular? Just notice what the emotion's trying to do for you, how it's trying to help you, even if it's misguided. And you might just communicate to the emotion with a whisper. some recognition, some appreciation.

It might be as simple as thank you for trying to protect me. I'm okay right now. I thank you for trying to help me. We'll work together. I'm listening. Notice what happens when you in some way acknowledge the intelligence or positive intention of an emotion. Sense if you can feel a little more space,

little more balance. This is a radical shift. Being at war with our difficult emotions to responding with some sense of honoring or appreciation, not making them wrong, offering a respectful attention. There's a poem by poet and friend Kaviri Patel called Thanking a Monkey. She writes, there's a monkey in my mind swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today I thanked her and she jumped down straight into my lap,

trapeze still swinging as we sat still. Okay, so that's part one. Shifting our attitude, shifting our attitude and recognizing these emotions, these animal-headed deities, is from our limbic system having an intelligence and just appreciating their presence. The second, which you could hear a little in this poem, is learning how to step out of thoughts. And perhaps the most basic and invaluable training we get in mindfulness, is to become mindful of thoughts. So we have a choice to step out of them. Thoughts can serve us, but a lot of thoughts are fear-based and they just keep cycling and keeping our energy really tight and scared. So it becomes incredibly freeing when we're caught in fear-thinking,

which includes judging, blaming, worrying. When we're caught in it, it becomes incredibly freeing to know how to say, okay, thinking, thinking, I can come back. I don't have to be here. If we don't know how to step out of thoughts, we can stay in patterns of reactivity. You may have patterns of defensiveness that you don't like in yourself or blame or aggression. We can stay in those patterns for years, for decades, just because we don't know how to wake up out of our thought patterns. I heard a story I'll share with you about a committee of a congregation and they were ensnared in a really bitter debate about the way one of the core religious rituals was to be conducted. Who would perform it, how often? And it was dividing people and it was creating hostilities

and testing friendships and everybody who was kept on circling their same ideas of, I'm right and this is how things should be. Well, one person suggests. that they seek the counsel of one of the oldest living members of the congregation. And they agreed. So a couple went to speak with them. And they said, well, did they do it this way back then? And they described what they were thinking was one of the approaches to the problem. And the old man said, no, not that way. And then they said, well, what about this way? They shook a said, no, not that way. And they said, well, kind of exhaust, well, what are we supposed to do the entire congregation's arguing, accusing, in deep conflict. He said, that's the way we did it.

We just get stuck. We get so stuck in our ideas about how things should be. And they either turn us against ourselves or against others. So if we want to stop the war, we need the capacity to recognize the repeating cycling thoughts that perpetuate fear and separation. And when you recognize them, it's not about fighting them. It's not trying to obliterate them. It's just to appreciate, okay, thank you for trying to help, and then inviting our attention into the present moment. It might be to your breath. It might be to the sounds that are right here. It might be to the feelings in the body, whatever it is, we learn the art of coming from our thoughts into the present moment. One man was describing his pathway of learning this. He spent several years in

prison. Now he's actually helping inmates, but he described a story that has really stayed with me when he was in prison. He said he did fine during the days. He stayed busy. He stayed busy. he would work out, he'd be reading, watching TV engaged, but he dreaded the nights. He said, night after night, the same thoughts occupied my mind. This is the monkey spinning around. He said, I'm going to miss my babies next two years. I'm going to miss my son becoming a teen. I'm going to miss my daughter's college years.

There's nothing I can do about it. So this was a nightly source of increasing stress, and he said it prevented him from falling asleep and his fear was, okay, the next 700 nights are going to be this way. Okay, so you get the setup, how he's being tormented by his mind. And at first he said, I blame the noises at night for keeping me up and I resolved to meditate and specifically concentrate on my breathing to block out the noise. I was unsuccessful. Then I tried to accept the noises as part of my bedtime routine instead of fighting it. And even though I didn't know anything about mindfulness at the time, I let myself be in the moment and become fully present with the sounds around me.

I got to the point where I could tell time by the sound of the keys at shift change. I could tell what officer was working by the angle of the lights flashed on my closed eyes and if a new inmate was there due to the increased snoring. By becoming present in my senses, focusing on the next, nightly, I was not thinking about the past, the future, are things that were out of control. Without knowing it, I believe I was taking steps to be mindful, to be free in the present moment. I was so touched by this story because I realized we're all in prison when we are caught in obsessive thinking, when we're caught in fear thinking and we don't know our way out.

and this man Tony is describing a way out that we come right into our senses, that we see the thoughts and we say thank you very much and come right to the sound, the sensations, right in the moment. And it gives us, I think, one of the great gifts on the path, which is we realize I don't have to believe my thoughts. So the first step is to recognize these animal-headed, deities and say, okay, thank you for trying to help, you know, not fighting them. The attitude is to be with them versus to be at war with them. The second is to know how to step out of the

circling thoughts and come into the present moment. The third step is, okay, and the present moment is often the fear in our body. Can we contact and open to the life that's here? And those that have been with me before know this, I love this story of the sage who, his question was, what are you unwilling to feel? Because anything we're avoiding actually grasps us and our identity becomes affixed to it. So the liberating freedom is to be willing to touch the vulnerability in our bodies. And if you start observing yourself, you'll start seeing how, how many ways you have of trying to control your experience so you actually don't touch

into the energy of the animal-headed deities, the fear, the anger, the hurt, don't feel it in the body. So it's a real, it's a commitment. It's a commitment that's a little counterintuitive to actually lean in and feel what's here. I'll share from my own. own life that one of the most challenging times for me when I felt I was in prison was about 15 years ago when I was in a hospital and my health was in this downward spiral and it was unclear what was wrong. All I knew was that I was having to cancel things I had agreed on teaching and something was off with my heart and we weren't sure what it was. And so I became increasingly despairing and my mind was circling and circling and circling. So I had to practice just

what we're talking about. I had to come out of my thoughts, feel in my body this incredible grip of fear. This is the animal-headed deity of fear. And under that, a huge grief about all the life I felt like I was losing. My mantra became, meet your edge and soften. meet your edge and soften. It was a phrase I'd heard from a Tibetan teacher. And this became my way of really fully contacting the fear and the grief. It would come up and I would just say, okay, stay. Just meet your edge and soften. And in that softening, there was a kind of surrendering of resistance and an opening. And that's when I started discovering a kind of space of openness and tenderness.

that really felt like a refuge. But it came not by getting rid of the grief and fear, but by meeting my edge and softening. And I'll say, I sometimes tell this story and people wonder, did I ever get better? And I'm much, much better. I had a downward spiral and I, by grace, I'm much, much healthier. And I continue when strong emotions come up, the same practice, come out of the thoughts, contact what's here, really, really dedicated to meeting that edge and softening. I'll share with you a poem I love. This is by my friend poet Dana Faults. There is no controlling life. Try corraling a lightning bolt, containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel.

Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow and grace will carry you to higher ground. The only safety lies in letting it all in, the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures and success. When loss rips off the doors of the heart, our sadness veils your vision with despair practice becomes simply bearing the truth in the choice to let go of your known way of being the whole world is revealed to your new eyes so we've talked about the attitude the attitude of really

honoring okay these emotions may i be with them and then coming out of the thoughts and then learning to really contact them, really touch, really allow. The last step that I want to explore with you, once we've really open to them, is holding them truly with love. And there are many pathways to finding that love and bringing it to the pain that's in us. But that is what the pain most needs. Some of you might remember this from the poet Rilke. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us, act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest essence something helpless that wants our love. what these limbic energies are seeking really is connection.

The fear, the anger, the shame all wants to move us towards connection. We suffer because we forget our belonging to one another, to life. So we need to find our pathways to loving, to loving those dragons or whether you want the metaphor of the animal-headed deities, to bringing love to the vulnerable people. places. Another story for you that really came to mind as I was reflecting on this talk that I wanted to share. I heard this from a counselor who worked at an illegal foreigner detention center in Holland and the people imprisoned there have no idea when they're going to get released. In fact,

Amnesty International condemn them for this. It's considered a modern form of torture. No idea when they're going to get released. And that combined with no work, no structure, poor facility, it's pretty awful. So a young man was in prison there and this counselor was working with him and he told her that it was his mother's birthday the prior week. And she asked if he had done something to mark the day and here's what he told her. He said, yes, I used my phone card to dial random numbers and kept dialing until a woman answered the phone. Then I explained to the woman at the other end of the line that I was in a legal foreigner's detention and don't know how much longer they'll keep me here, that it was my mom's birthday and that I miss her so much and just wanted to tell

some woman, any woman, happy birthday for my mother and that I love her. We so long to feel our connection. And the point here obviously isn't to randomly dial numbers, but to know that the parts of us that are in pain need to know a larger belonging. It's always the pain of separation. There's some flavor of loving that's needed. Now we can offer to ourselves, as we've practiced together a lot, we can put our hand on our heart and send a message of kindness inwardly. And if we're feeling very small and young and regressed and we can't offer it to ourselves, we can imagine a source that we would really want to feel it from. Perhaps a grandmother no longer alive, or a friend, or maybe a spiritual deity, maybe a healer.

And just imagine the love, the words that we want to hear coming from that being. That counts. It doesn't. we have this false idea that unless we're loving ourselves, we're not really doing it right. But any sense of love being brought to the vulnerability will help to dissolve the sense of separation and reconnect us with a wider consciousness. It doesn't matter whether it's from our own high self or from a friend or a deity. Love heals. So experiment.

And if you feel really caught just the simple prayer, please love me to the universe. If you ask it with longing, there'll be a porousness, a tenderness, a receptivity that'll make you available. You will get what you ask for when you ask for it from the depth of your heart. I want to loop back to where we started. my friends because I shared with you the story about the gangs and that truce and them serving together, serving the greater good, that whole inquiry will they return to rivalry? And the inquiry tonight's really for each of us. When we're stressed, are we going to return to our habits of reacting from fear, blaming ourselves, blaming others, someone.

way shutting down are can we learn to pause? Can we honor the experience that's come up? And here's the challenging part. Agree to feel it. Feel the feelings. And in some way, call on love. Because as we do, as we change our relationship to fear and call on love, it reveals a larger truth. What we come to see, and this is really the key to the whole transformation this path we're on, is that the changing stories, the reactions, the fears, the animal-headed goddesses are not who you are. It's like there are waves in the ocean, but you are the loving awareness that's holding all the experiences. And the more you take refuge in presence and the more you relate with love, the more you'll trust that who you are is the loving awareness.

And then you can respond. You can respond to your own fears and you can respond to other people who are vulnerable with a really intimate presence because you know, you know how to stay. You know how to be there. We're going to close with a practice, just taking these steps and putting it together. It's really one form of sheltering in love. But first I want to say that we call this sheltering in love and yet there's this understanding that in our actual sheltering, there's such differences. This pandemic is affecting us in so many different.

ways and it's as unequal as the society itself. So part of this dedication to sheltering in love is to really open our hearts to those who are not just inconvenienced or those who are not feeling anxiety and fear but those who are most likely to contract the virus, to die from it, to be financially devastated, those are the ones, those people who are economically disadvantaged to start with, those of color, those in prisons, those in camps. I bring this up because we're going to be practicing and then widening the circles to include not just our own fears but really the struggle of so many in our hearts.

So with that, if you will, to find a way of sitting, that you're comfortable, alert, close your eyes. This practice is really called awakening through the animal-headed deities. And we begin by scanning, just sensing in your life any place where you're encountering painful emotions that are hard to be with. Let whatever situation comes to mind

be right close in for you so you can sense what it's triggering, what you're afraid of, what's most distressing. And you might notice how you've been relating to the emotions that come up. Have you felt like they were wrong or bad or wished they would go away, tried to ignore them? What has your relationship been with the animal-headed deities that arise, these limbic energies? So often we think there's something wrong with us for feeling them, and yet they're universal. Letting yourself pause and exploring the possibility that these emotions are really a portal to awakening, that they are the pathway. As one teacher puts it, I think it's Tikna-Han, no mud, no lotus.

That this is what's calling your attention to help you, wake up. It's not a mistake. So we begin by just honoring that, offering a respectful attention to whatever emotions are coming up, moving from any thoughts that might be catching your attention right to the body. And you might ask the question, what most wants my attention? Just sensing this animal-headed deity's calling for your attention. Well, what most wants my attention? It's similar to that question, what am I unwilling to feel? Just feel into your body. Your throat, your chest, your belly.

You might even put your hand where you feel emotions, where that energy of the animal-headed deity lives in your body. The fear, the anger, the shame. Just let your hand help you keep contact. And you might sense for yourself, what does it mean to meet my edge and soften? to be intimate with the feelings that are right here. Let your breath help to keep your attention,

right where the feelings and emotions are most vulnerable. Meeting your edge and softening, deepening that presence by offering care. Thank you for trying to protect me. I'm here with you. I love you. I'm not leaving. Or perhaps calling on some source of loving

a friend, a healer, a teacher, and sense their compassion, their light and warmth, just washing through you, going right to that place of vulnerability. When these energies are held with presence and love, what's the sense of who you are? Can you sense how your being is occupying a wider field of consciousness? That there's more tenderness? There's more space. Movement of awakening is to a wider field of consciousness, a shared heart space. And I invite you to send into that now to imagine and sense how so many of us right now are practicing together, sincerely bringing our attention to the challenging places,

awakening through these universal energies to that heart space. Feel us all around the globe. a shared heart space that can hold and respond to our hurting world, and together now to feel our prayer that this heart space can hold those who are most vulnerable with care, that we invite forward in our minds, perhaps one group of people that are particularly challenged, to let ourselves be touched, feel tenderness towards. towards, care towards these people, to know them as part of our heart, to sense we hold each other and all beings in our hearts, to sense our shared prayer that all beings everywhere

might know their deepest nature as loving presence, that we might live from loving presence, serve from loving presence, savor from loving presence, that all be able to be a loving presence, that all beings might touch a great and natural peace, that there's peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace everywhere. May all beings everywhere be healed, be awakened, be free. Well, Namaste, and deep bow and blessings to each. Please stay well. Please take good, good care. And I'll look forward to being with you again next week. Thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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