Tara Brach - Sheltering in Love (Part 5): Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Sheltering in Love (Part 5): Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence (2020-04-22) - The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. These next two talks look at the epidemic of loneliness pre-dating the pandemic, and how loneliness is exacerbated in our current global crisis for those living alone, and for those feeling disconnected to themselves and others. We then explore how a courageous practice of compassionate presence - with our inner life, and in relationships - can turn the energy of loneliness into a current of healing and freedom.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. So this is our Sheltering in Love Talk number five and I thought I'd begin with some reports in the last 10 days of those navigating crisis from home. One person writes, I still haven't decided where to go for Easter. week. The living room or the bedroom. Another. Day six of homeschooling. My child just said, I hope I don't have the same teacher next year. I'm offended. Another. I'm so excited. It's

time to take out the garbage. What should I wear? And one more for you. This morning I saw a neighbor talking to her cat. It was obvious she thought her cat understood her. I came into my house and told my dog, we laughed a lot. That was my favorite. So, you know, even though, and the exception, of course, is the frontline workers, most of us are at home and we're in our apartments or we're in our houses. And it's so easy to have this illusion that your home and your space, but others are out there engaged and with each other doing things that the world's still buzzing along, you know, stores and trains and government and so on. And maybe you imagine me here with this staff or team producing this, but actually it's

just me. Here upstairs in my office, my dog is right over in the next room, Jonathan a couple of rooms over, somewhere else in the house. And my team is each in their own homes. So it's really a kind of an illusion because the reality is we're all in our own spaces right now and just invite you to maybe close your eyes for a moment and reflect. Take a moment to imagine so many of us right here, right now, in our own spaces, maybe with pets or family or alone, looking into a screen or listening or with our eyes closed. And you might bring the different

countries to mind where people are coming from, perhaps city settings, rural settings. how we're all dressed pretty casually, no one's looking, sitting quietly reflecting right now. And as you sense others, that we wouldn't be here. None of us would be here if we didn't have a longing in some way to wake up our hearts. And you might mentally whisper, we are friends. We are friends. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt to sense that because deep down it's what we all want to feel connection and caring.

We are friends and if you'd like to open your eyes please feel free. So over the years when I'm about to give a talk and these are times especially if I'm feeling anxious that's my reflection. I'll just reflect okay we're friends and it helps me shift from feeling separate in my kind of presenter role and apart from others, to that sense that here we are and we're waking up together, which relaxes my heart. It softens. And I wanted to start this way tonight because when we're suffering to any degree, it's because we've forgotten that connection. We've forgotten that belonging to ourselves, to each other, to life. And, you know, of course,

we know that before the pandemic, loneliness has been on a very steep rise, scary steep, considered epidemic proportions, 61% in the United States. It's three out of five. Reporting, they feel lonely and isolated. And now with the pandemic, especially for those who live alone, but really as we'll explore for so many, it can really accentuate that feeling of either loneliness are really separate, disconnected. And as many are aware, loneliness is this prison with many physical and emotional and social repercussions. So for this class and for next, our sheltering and love talk will focus on the pain of separation,

on loneliness as a core expression of suffering. we'll explore how if we can deepen attention, that very core pain actually becomes a portal for a very powerful portal for spiritual healing. So I want to invite you to pause here and I'm going to pause and just sense as you as you hear this topic, how might this relate to you? What's this like for you? Are you conscious of being lonely? Are you conscious of being lonely? Are you conscious of feeling disconnected in some way, either from yourself or others. So we'll explore this together. This week we'll focus on how we can relate inwardly when we feel that pain of separation and next week more interrelational field. But I like to start with the purpose of loneliness,

the evolutionary function, because we're social animals and we depend on each other for survival. So loneliness is actually a biologically rooted state and aversive state that motivates us to connect. So it's got from an evolutionary point of view a positive intention to, and we're all wired for it to move us to connect. And a couple of years ago, researchers at MIT actually found the place in the brain where loneliness is correlated. It's called the dorsal raffae nucleus.

And so this part of the brain gets stimulated and makes us feel bad and then hopefully it motivates us to move towards social affinity. But of course, as we know, it often doesn't. Often we end up going deeper into ourselves. Now, to make a note right here, when I'm talking about loneliness, I'm not talking about the feeling of being alone, our solitude, all of which can be very, very, you know, rich and healthy for us. I'm talking about a real pain that comes with a feeling of something's deeply wrong. And as I mentioned, it's on the increase. So how come we're lonelier? And it's really

interesting when you think of the whole span, the thousands and thousands of years of human civilization, we humans have lived together. And being apart from society was actually, its social death, that's banishment is considered second to only execution, you know, as something that's a punishment in our lives. And it's only in the last 50 years that there's been a dramatic societal shift where more and more people are living alone and just a few statistics because it's pretty dramatic that in the 1950s or in 1950, 22%, this is America, of American adults were single and now more than 50%. 22% to more than 50%.

In 1950, 4 million people lived alone. Today, 31 million. So like one out of seven adults lives alone. And as we know, women live longer, so there's a lot of elderly women who live alone. And again, living alone doesn't necessarily mean loneliness. But if we are lonely, the isolation can spiral on itself and lead to real suffering. Many societies have no real access to belonging, to feeling community. There's a breakdown of families, the breakdown of any geographic kind of community,

and breakdown of our connection to the earth. And so there's often not so many good avenues to authentic connecting, which of course is the healing of loneliness. and as it turns out, one of the populations that has it the worst is our young adults, very anxious, very lonely. And many also know that it's correlated with high media usage. You can use media wisely, but this is not, I'm not talking about wise usage, I'm talking about high usage as a substitute for meaningful contact.

So it can be because we're living alone and isolated and also you may be sheltering with a family, with roommates or whatever, and feel utterly lonely. You know the saying, what are everywhere and not a drop to drink. So we look closer and usually loneliness in some way we're feeling different and worse than others. We don't fit in, maybe to our family. we don't fit into the larger society. There's loneliness if we're from a non-dominant population and without a supportive affinity group. So let's say it's a person of color working in a white

majority workplace or somebody of one religion working where everybody else is, let's say, Christian or somebody with a different sexual orientation, that can create loneliness. Upshot is there's many causes. It's on the increase. and the pandemic can accentuate it in a really, really painful way. The physical effects are being researched more and more. Researchers have found that loneliness is just as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Those of us who are lonely are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with healthy social relationships.

And it has to do with a weakened immune system and inflammation. loneliness is a signal to our survival brain that in some way we're cut off and in danger. It's a huge stress. The government spends more than $6.7 billion annually on additional medical costs for Medicare recipients who lack social contact. And then on the other side of things, if you happen to have a dog, it gives you 24% risk reduction for death by any cause. The emotional correlates are just actually I want to spend a little bit more time on because it goes hand in hand loneliness with depression, with anxiety, with sleep disorders.

And again it makes sense because if we feel lonely there's an anxiety about feeling endangered in some way and we get hypervigilant and actually wake up more times during the night so it's difficult to sleep through. shows that loneliness affects self-regulation, which means when we're feeling really lonely, it's harder to exercise regularly or to eat the way we want to eat. It really affects that whole process. This is the worst piece, I think, the real lock in the prison door, which is that when we feel lonely, we feel ashamed of our lonely self. We don't like our lonely self. There's a reflex of judgment that something's wrong with us for feeling lonely, that it reflects

some flaw. I want to read you a poem that resonates for me. This is Michael Hoffman. It's called Night. It's all right unless you're either lonely or under attack. That strange, effortful repositioning of yourself, laundering. shopping, hours, the telephone, and less misinformed, only ever ringing for you if it ever does. The night, yours to decide, among drink or books are lying there, on your back or curled up,

an embarrassment of poverty. I'm struck by those words, an embarrassment of poverty, that in some way loneliness is the deepest poverty we have impoverished in terms of connection and it's embarrassing in some way the lack of connections assign again there's something wrong so it's a very deep core

pain our vulnerability to deal with and because it's so deep and so core we do a lot to to cover it over. We don't face our own loneliness very often. There's a fear of it. So what do we do? Well, we depress it, which is why depression and loneliness go together so much. We cover it over with obsessive thinking, often behaviors like overeating or alcohol or drugs, or time online. And in a broad way, all of us seek substitute gratifications to whatever degree we don't feel connected. So we might feel a little bit lonely and we'll grasp onto something

or very deeply lonely. But when the basic need for connection is missing, we try to fill it in. So some people who have that kind of hole inside of that empty hole of not feeling connected will seek power over others. And we can see that and the danger of it, what happens. And we can see those that are feeling a lack of connection will try to prove their worth and get hooked on just accomplishing or performing. Some who feel lonely will get fixated on material goods or are making money and then more money and then more money. This is Rita Rudner. She writes, Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to get. And it's silly and there's some truth because when we seek what I call false refuge for

our loneliness, like making money, it actually deepens our isolation. The moments that we're going for a false refuge, whether it's money or drugs or impressing people, we bury over the loneliness in a way that we can't really contact the very vulnerability we need to feel to begin healing. So we have to be able to be willing in a way to find the loneliness that is buried in our unconscious. When I say the word unconscious, it reminds me of Jackie Mason, who was kind of before my time, and I'm sure before many of your time, a comedian, he was talking to a psychiatrist, and he says, the psychiatrist is saying, we're here to understand your unconscious. And Mason's response, my unconscious is none of my business, which is sometimes how we

feel, I don't want to know. But of course, Carl Jung would beg to differ. Carl Jung describes all of our suffering as coming from the unseen, unfelt parts of the psyche, from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. Last week we explored embracing difficult emotions, the animal-headed deities. If you didn't listen to it, it's kind of a nice sequence from that to this week's discussion because the understanding is the animal-headed deities are the kind of limbic emotional energies that if we avoid or resist actually keep us identified. with them. But if we open to them with a curiosity and a kindness, they actually transform and we

arrive in sacred space. Their energy becomes available to us, the positive parts of their energy. So loneliness is one of those animal-headed deities, that core of feeling afraid and ashamed. and you might think to yourself, oh, I'm plenty aware of my loneliness. But if we're honest, it's not that common that we pause really deeply to open to the pain of separation, just to open into it. Usually we're aware of it and then we spin into other thoughts and other reactions. So the process that we're going to be exploring now, which is really a spiritual, transformation is how to deepen our attention to this kind of core pain of loneliness.

And the beginning is that we have to recognize it. And I'll share a bit of one of the first times for me that I came face to face with this particular animal-headed deity. I was living in an ashram in my early 20s. I stayed in an ashram for about 10 years. And so it was the opposite of living alone. I was living with 60 people who worked together and did meditations together and ate together. It was together, together, together, together. And early on, we were also having some women's groups where we would share what was going on for us. And I remember that in one of those meetings, some of the women were sharing about their challenges with their children.

many of them were moms. I wasn't at that time. Or they were sharing their challenges were at work or health issues. And I was kind of holding back what was going on for me because it felt way, way more, like much more exposure, which was I had this growing sense of feeling fake. Like I was teaching a lot of yoga then and teaching about becoming more spiritually pure and feeling really unspiritual, feeling really selfish and aware of all of my self-doubts were on top. And so I tried to name that in the group and I didn't feel much understanding. And when I went back to my little room, I felt completely ashamed and kind of exposed in a bad way and I just started crying and there's just kind of cracking open to that shame and fear.

and my first thought was, okay, I'm going to do some yoga, or I'm going to meditate, or I'm going to journal. I'm trying to figure out what should I do now. But something in me said, no, just stay. Stay with this. So I stayed and I could feel right at the core this just anguish of not belonging, of being separate, of loneliness. In those moments of just face-to-face naming it or recognizing it, the pain was a lot. but I was actually the beginning of connecting with myself in a much deeper way. I was connecting with myself because I was getting in touch with something very real.

And of course that eventually led to connecting with others more. And I'm going to come back to the process of being with loneliness. But I just want to say even to this day, when I am feeling bad, when I'm in a bad mood, and I start going under it in some way, I'm feeling disconnected from myself. I'm not liking myself. And I'm feeling disconnected from others. And the bad is a sense of separateness.

So we recognize the core pain and then the inquiry is, well, how do we open to these feelings when they're so raw and so painful? And first to say, remember that they usually emerge very early. They're a very young part of ourself. They come from the way we were, the way we fit in with our families and our early experiences and how much attunement and healthy attachment there was. So they arise early. And the question then is, how do you approach a frightened, lonely child?

That's really the question. So maybe as a way to gentle into that question, I'm going to share with you as a story from a Dharma teacher, a Buddhist Dharma teacher, Gil Franzdale, who I have great respect for. And he wrote a book called A Monastery Within. And this is one of the stories he tells is of an engineer who visited the monastery regularly for many years and the practices made sense to him. They gave him hope he might overcome someday this chronic unhappiness and separation and deep pain. So he tried all the practices

that the abbess of the monastery gave him. And with each, he'd encountered this wall of suffering because he would just try to think his way out, caught in his mind. So after many rounds, the abbess decided to give him a different approach. And she gave him a special practice, one that he'd have to do outside the monastery for two years.

And then when he completed it, could return and get other teachings. But this was the practice. He was to spend two years volunteering 10 hours a week at a maternity ward at a hospital holding babies born prematurely. And the understanding is without enough physical contact. They couldn't grow healthy. So he plunged in, holding these small, fragile beings ever so carefully, watching their every breath and they seemed in danger of stopping breathing at any moment and he found the most effective way to care for them was to hold them against his chest. Six months go by and he started feeling something new. He started feeling a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his

being. And it was foreign. It didn't fit his ideas of self so he ignored he didn't try to think it out which is good because it probably would have interfered with the warmth. Over the months the warmth expanded to fill his whole body and gradually it dissolved some hard, darkened wall around his heart. He completed his time, he returned to the monastery and the abbess saw he was transformed. He was no longer that desperate, lonely, unhappy person trying to fit everything into his conceptual framework. So he was given new instructions, which were when you meditate, don't think about what's happening. Don't get lost in those thoughts.

Rather, let your awareness be seated in this tender warmth you feel in your body. Hold what arises with that tender awareness. And if you do that, your meditation will continue to wake you up. And the man found this to be true. So, the movement, and you can sense the preemies as that kind of part of ourselves inside that are alone, lonely, scared, how to relate, we move from our head to our heart, we feel in our body, and we hold kindly. And I love this story for that because like Premies, we can't really flourish without feeling belonging to a larger source of presence.

I'm going to say that again because this feels so core. We can't flourish, we can't awaken without sensing our belonging to the whole, to the natural world, to each other, to life, to awareness. If we think we're a separate individual self, we'll be living with all the cravings and fears that spiral around that self and we will not be happy. It's our social species, our most profound need is belonging. And as I mentioned, we're wired to want it. You know, that feeling I could die of loneliness that people talk about. It's in our DNA. And there's been all sorts of research, animals that were raised in isolation from flies to mice to chimps.

I have shorter lifespans. solitary confinement is considered the worst torture for humans in terms of criminal punishment. And back to where we are today with a pandemic, it's triggering a kind of trauma for some and certainly emotional pain for others to feel confined, to feel disconnected. Once we've recognized her loneliness, what is it that stops us from regarding with kindness. How can we don't hold it close in? And I want to again loop back and say, hand in hand with loneliness, come shame. It's hard to hold that lonely self. We wouldn't believe we were in solitary confinement being punished in some way unless something was wrong with us.

So we have aversion to the self that's lonely, which of course then makes us pull back from others, which makes us more cut off and lonely and it's a downward spiral. So let's look at that. We kind of are going through how to be with the inner loneliness, and the first step is we have to recognize it. Okay, this is loneliness. And the next, as we learn from that engineer story, is we have to move from the mind to the body.

We have to kind of lean in towards and offer kindness. and what inspires us to have that intention to bring kindness inwardly? What inspires us? And my sense of that is that we each intuit that awakening requires loving ourselves into healing. We intuit that there needs to be kindness. even if we don't feel it, we sense that that's what's needed and deep down we want to heal. Deep down we want to heal. That is our love for ourselves.

We might not feel it, we might be in stories of shame, but deep down we want to heal. We want to learn to love ourselves. So let's explore how to move towards that. And as a way of exploring that, I'm going to share another poem. This has been one of the most impactful poems for me over the years. I first saw it many, many years ago, and I've been sharing it ever since by the poet Hafeis. He writes this, don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep.

Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few humans. and even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need for God, absolutely clear. Let the loneliness cut more deep. When we let the loneliness be felt fully, it reveals a sacred longing, whether we use the word God or wholeness or Buddha nature.

whatever, it reveals a longing to belong to the sacred. So I bring this now back to that night in my early 20s in the ashram that there I was in my room and facing, okay, this is loneliness, stay, stay, don't go off and do a journaling or whatever, and opened into that real pain of it. and with it there was a sense of grief of having really lost loving connection in some way. Let it cut more deep. And there was weeping as I felt how raw and deep it was, that pain of separation.

And I remember holding myself like this and kind of rocking. I'm sure many of you have know that one. And the more I opened to the pain of separation, the more I felt, the longing for belonging. That's what was embedded in it, was this longing for belonging. And what I sensed as I let that longing be full was this opening to a very tender and loving presence that felt like home, like more the truth of who I was in any of the stories about an imperfect yogi or a fake. And those were stories. and they had a lot of emotion to them, but this sense of just this tender, tender presence

felt more true and more real than any of the stories. I can say that through my life that sense of belonging or oneness comes and goes. It's like awakening and then forgetting and waking up and forgetting. But when there's a forgetting, that trance of separation is a wake-up. When I feel the suffering of it, it's not like I think, oh, something's bad here, it's more, oh, there's some separation here, deepen attention. And that then reconnects me with the longing. And what I found is that I wouldn't have that longing.

And I'm speaking really for all of us. We wouldn't have a longing for connection if we didn't have some intuition of that connectedness. If we didn't have some sense of what it was, we couldn't long for it. And when we open to the longing, it carries us into the belonging. It says, John O'Donohue says, and I love this. He talks about prayers, the bridge between longing and belonging. When we let that longing be full, we go right to the essence of that longing, which is that oneness. Again, a poem for you.

I'm sharing a few of my favorites tonight. And this is the poet Rilke. I long to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing. I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart. Oh, let them take me now. Into them, I place these fragments my life

and you, God, spend them however you want. True belonging is a spiritual experience beyond any religion, beyond any philosophy. We put the words on, as I mentioned, God or whatever, Jesus, Buddha. It's a deeply held experience of being part of reality, of the wholeness, of boundless love, of loving awareness. It can't be lost, but it can be forgotten, and that's when we go into pain. That's what loneliness is.

It's the pain of separation when we're forgetting and the pathway to remembering, recognize it and let it cut more deep. You know, the word courage for me, it's really the willingness to feel vulnerable, that greatness of heart that is willing to contact the truth of what we're feeling inside us. And like that engineer with the preemies, when we do, we can start beginning to hold that vulnerability with us. our heart. One poet Raymond Carver was dying of cancer and he wrote, and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. So tonight we've been exploring the animal-headed deity of loneliness,

that pain of separation that's so deep in so many of us and how we can hold that vulnerability, a kind of, I sometimes think of it as a spiritual reparenting. And next week we'll explore how we can connect with that and then sense our deepening of belonging with others. And this This short closing meditation that we'll be doing right now is a practice that will kind of bring together some of the pieces from tonight. So this short reflection is called bringing our hearts to loneliness. Please take a moment if you will. Make yourself comfortable.

Close your eyes. Take a few full breaths to collect your attention. You might scan through your body and sense what wants to let go right now, maybe relaxing your shoulders, letting the hands rest in an easy, effortless way, and softening your belly, letting the breath go deep into the torso. From this presence, scanning more of your life and sensing how in these current days you might be living with the pain of separation. if it's the case where you might be feeling some disconnection from yourself and from others,

might be expressing from in the sense of loneliness or maybe you feel it as anxiety or depression. But there's a sense of vulnerability with that. And if there's a particular situation or circumstances that help you get in touch with where you feel disconnected, bring them to mind. It might be a place in your own home or apartment. It might be certain people that actually accentuate your loneliness. There may be certain thoughts in your mind about the world that deepen it, certain judgments about yourself.

Let yourself recognize, okay, this is the pain of separation. And sense where you feel it in your body. As you sense the worst part of the situation, the worst part of feeling disconnected. Let yourself feel in your body, the throat, the chest, belly, sense where the vulnerability lives. And if you haven't done this before especially, but if you have for sure, place your hand where you feel vulnerable. Just as that engineer held those babies to put your hand right somewhere close to the contact with the vulnerability. Invite it to be as much as it is. the vulnerable parts of ourselves, I think of them as shy, wild creatures in the woods,

and if we're trying to invite them into the light of awareness, we need to, with gentleness and interest, just say I'm here, it's okay. You can be here. You belong. And then feel into your body what happens. Vodhafe says, let it cut more deep. sense your willingness to feel right now, the pain of separation, the loneliness, the felt sense of really being separate from others. This pain is wanting something. What does it want? What's the longing buried in it?

What does I want to move you towards? If there was a prayer, please may I feel, what would it be? We heard that phrase to feel yourself beloved in this life. Beloved. You might imagine someone could be a person that you love, a friend, someone you trust, or maybe a spiritual figure, or maybe it's a formalist being, right here close in, helping you to feel beloved, attending to you, their consciousness surrounding you. total acceptance and care, understanding you, that you're felt and cared for, that you're

a beloved part of them, and feeling your hand on your heart or wherever it is, just sense that your own awake hard and perhaps this loved one are helping to hold that pramie, that young vulnerable place, bathing with love, sensing the bridge from longing to belonging, You might widen your attention right now and sense the quality of heart space that's here. Whatever degree there's been some opening into more tenderness, to whatever degree. And you might widen the attention to sense that you're with others that right in these moments are working with the same painful state, that it's a universal state, that feeling

of separation, that we're all encountering it. and finding our way to love ourselves into healing. So feel that togetherness, that we are friends and that this heart space really holds all of us. You might feel your wish for all of us that we find our way into feeling beloved, feeling belonging. And as we feel that shared heart space

and sense it as boundless in all directions, feel ourselves including all those right, now who are suffering from feeling separate, from sickness, from fear. All those who are suffering, humans and other species, the earth our mother, holding all in our lap and in our heart, may all know themselves as beloved, may all trust their belonging. May all beings everywhere sense that innate, loving connection, and may we live from love. May we live from love.

May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and blessings, my friends. I'm so glad to be with you. Stay well, be well, and I look forward to being together 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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