Tara Brach - Sheltering in Love – Part 8: Finding Freedom in the Midst of Failure (2020-05-13)

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Sheltering in Love – Part 8: Finding Freedom in the Midst of Failure (2020-05-13) - Everyone faces personal failure, and it's an extremely raw and painful feeling. If we have the courage to stay with the feelings, failure can become a portal to the realization of who we are beyond the imperfect separate self. This talk calls on Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote (referenced by Pema Chödron), "Fail, Fail again, Fail better," and offers guidance on finding freedom as we move through some of our most difficult moments.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. We're together here for the eighth now of our sheltering in love talks and last week we explored the prison of blaming others and this week I'd like to reflect together on how we're relating to our inner experience. our relationship with our inner life. Recently, I saw one of those viral emails

and it said, breaking news, wearing a mask inside your home is now highly recommended, not so much to prevent COVID-19, but to stop eating. And I was just reflecting on this universal human tendency we have. Whenever we feel uncomfortable, whenever we feel restless or fearful or distressed, we try to seek a way out of it.

We try to get rid of the feeling. We try to get away from the feeling. And of course, with lockdown, to whatever degree it's impacting your life, there's fewer escapes, exit strategies. So, of course, there's that tendency to leave by either overeating or oversleeping or busying ourselves or online. addictions or just obsessing and one of the big ways that we leave is chronic judgment as I mentioned we judge others but we also turn on ourselves for

our habits and for more it's another way of leaving so from the perspective of deep healing from the perspective of spiritual awakening the heart of the path is learning to stay learning to day with whatever waves of emotional difficulty are arising, really to be willing to be present with the loneliness, with the fears, with the hurts that for many of us we spend a lifetime running from. And it's inevitable that life will not work out the way we want at certain times and often a lot. It's just inevitable.

It's inevitable that we're going to experience painful emotions. We are all rigged to have that happen. So there's a Tibetan teacher that offers a metaphor that I have found really resonant. I wanted to share with you. And just to imagine that you're walking into the ocean and as happens, sometimes it's stirred up and we get knocked over by a strong wave. It's a strong wave of emotion of anger, fear, shame. And so either we get knocked over and we can lie there on the ocean floor, which is actually

another, it's like saying we're going to avoid getting up and being with the waves, it's the kind of way of dying or disconnecting from our full aliveness, are you just get up and you face forward and you continue to lean in and move towards and open to the waves, continue to walk out into the ocean, and they keep coming. But if we develop the capacity just keep standing up and facing them and opening to them, they start seeming smaller with less power to knock you over. So the basic understanding is this, that even when it's difficult to move in the direction of feeling your feelings.

And now I want to note here, of course, that you can open to your feelings. feelings fully, like really just feel them completely, are if they feel potentially traumatizing or overwhelming, then take baby steps. But the idea is have the intention of moving towards feeling your feelings. And do the waves get smaller? I mean so many people have asked me, you know, does it ever go away, the fear or the anger or the hurt? And I don't think waves go away. I think it's part of an ocean to have waves on the surface.

But actually what happens is the more we open to and feel the waves, the more ocean-like we become. We enlarge and become more whole and there's more space for the waves to come and go. We don't suffer so much. And this is the gift. opening to the waves, there really is a homecoming to who we are, to that full being, that full awareness. Now as we know, just to bring it into current times, during this global crisis surfs up. You know, the waves are pretty powerful and we can all feel how stress spikes when there's

so much uncertainty. And there's a real, for many of the direct feeling of threat in very critical ways and our life's disrupted. It's just not working out how we want it. And for many, really huge loss, huge suffering. So surfs up and it's triggering and it's really triggering for those of us that have trauma, but almost everybody is emotionally activated. Okay?

So the given is there are waves that are surging right now. And what I'd like to do together is focus on one particular type of wave that's really painful. And those are the waves of feeling personal failure. The waves of being down on ourselves. The ways of being really harsh or judgmental about how we're navigating our lives, how we're doing it. You know, the feelings of I'm blowing it, I'm falling short, I'm not okay, something bad's going to happen because of that. We have a really deep conditioning to shift from the feeling of this feels bad to I'm bad.

And I invite you to check that out how quickly when there's a feeling bad, feeling fear, feeling hurt, it terms into, I am bad. And I often term this the trance of unworthiness, and by that I mean the stories and the feelings of something, I'm flawed, I'm deficient. And so as we know, we blame others. We explored that, but usually there's an undercurrent when we're blaming others of a bad self.

And it's there, and we don't often see it, But if we don't see it, it actually is the most profound prism that shapes our life. So the inquiry for this talk really is how do we open to those kind of waves? The waves are really feeling bad about ourselves. Now, I want to just back up a little here and say that in my life, my personal life, my teaching, my working with others, it's become clear to me that the transatlantic, of unworthiness is perhaps one of the most pervasive ongoing ways that we suffer. And it's the reason that I wrote my first book, Radical Acceptance.

And it's the reason that I loop back and revisit it really regularly in talks is because I have to revisit in my own life, that background creeping feeling of something's wrong here. And what I've found is that When it's not faced, when we don't see it fully and open to it fully, these waves of feeling personal failure, they actually control everything. They control our mood. They control how capable we are of being close with others, really the whole contour of our life. And I've had so many people since writing radical acceptance tell me that once they caught on to the trance of unworthiness, once they could actually see it,

they actually felt like they were beginning to wake up from it, finding some freedom. I often share about there was a T-shirt award. The Washington Post handed out, the T-shirt of the year. This is a bunch of years ago. And on it it said, I have occasional delusions of adequacy. And that's kind of how it is. What's so notable about feelings of deficiency is it's not just a belief that you can, you know, you can't talk your judge out of saying something's wrong with you.

It's more than a belief. It's like a very deep-rooted set of feelings in the body. It feels true to us. I remember this cartoon that said it perfectly. It was this therapist talking to a dejected client saying, these feelings of unworthiness are very common amongst the unworthy. And that's what it is. It's not like I am a, I'm, you know, feelings of unworthiness are moving through me. It's like, I am a bad person. That's the feeling. And as I mentioned, when we're in it, it shapes

everything about our lives. Our relationships, how we work, we're not able to take risks really. There's no real spontaneity because we're always guarding and worried about falling short. This understanding became really alive for me when a friend told me about her mother when she was dying and coming out of a coma and looking at her and saying, all my life, I thought something was wrong with me. And then she closed her eyes and she died and those were her last words. And that story stayed with me because it's such a tragedy that we can move through our life, through our decades and have this basic belief and feeling of being not okay, block us from living our lives fully.

So let's pause here and I want to invite you to reflect to bring your attention inward and I probably will help to close your eyes. Take a few full breaths and just scanning your life now, your current life. You might sense where you're feeling the most stress these days in the midst of this crisis. maybe fears around health, finances, work, maybe your concerns for others, maybe conflict and relationship, maybe anger about what's unfolding in your life or in our society. Now look to see how you're relating to yourself. Notice if there are any judgments about how you are navigating, how you're moving through.

this. If there's any comparing with others, notice if you've turned on yourself in any way. So you're looking really for the trance of unworthiness and sense that you're really in a position of witnessing, seeking to understand more, knowing that by bearing witness, that's the first part of waking up. And bear witness if you sense where the judgments are or where the trance of unworthiness is how it's impacting you. What's it suffering? If you'd like to open your eyes, please do. So it helps to remember that it's not your trance of unworthiness. You don't get to own it. It's really the trance of unworthiness. It's just part of our common human psychological, biological mechanism that we go into this. And you can see,

sense how feeling flawed has been linked through the ages to the perception of original sin. There's a story I heard years ago that I've always loved about an Eskimo hunter and he asks a local missionary priest says if I did not know about God and sin would I go to hell? And the priest says, no, not if you didn't know. And then the Eskimo says earnestly, then why did you tell me? you know, it's so deep in our culture, or at least in some of our cultures. Many have received this basic message in Judeo-Christian countries and through churches, through parents, that in some way we've got to watch out for our sinful selves. And I know Garrison Keeler puts it wonderfully.

He says, my ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at the time. Watch out for your evil, bad self. So this trance is not my trance, it's the trance. And it's exacerbated by messages from not just our church, but just our contemporary society. I mean, I think in the United States about this, the assertion of white, supremacy and of course most countries have their hierarchies but here in the

United States it's particularly egregious the way it's been used to oppress and violate African Americans so that creates a much more thick trance of unworthiness the constant messaging of less than and then there's the current spike in this country of negative messaging to Asian Americans a friend of mine, her daughter was verbally assaulted by a white man, get out, you know, take the virus you brought back home, something like that. And, you know, rationally, she knew that she didn't do anything wrong. And yet inwardly, she felt shamed. The messages that we receive play into a deep sense of not okay. And of course, there's a whole long list of who our

society demeans, refugees, immigrants, and more. So the society sends the message and then of course it's more and more exacerbated by the messages that we grew up with from our caretakers who again are products of the society. But we internalize. We internalize the critical voices. So for one student sharing with me, her mother when she was very young would always say, why do you have to be such a prima donna, you know? And she just uncovered how deeply she felt dismissed for her feelings making her oversensitive. And now how she hates herself for her feelings. She feels like I'm a needy person and I'm bad and I'll be rejected. You know, we get those messages and we really install them. They get installed. So how many, how many,

have spent a lifetime recycling the stories and the feelings that solidify a sense of self-contempt, self-hatred, going through life sorting for evidence that support the conclusions that in some way we're failing or we're going to fail. So I spent some time with this because it is so deep in so many of our psyches, it's a very painful wave that can hit us. Something is wrong with me. And the sign of being caught in the trance of unworthiness, and this is important to sense, is that we leave our body because we don't want to live with the unpleasantness of feeling deficient. We live in our stories and thoughts. The emotions that are going on in background are anxiety, depression. There's a chronic judge. There's a chronic monitoring looking for what's

wrong with me. Often it goes what's wrong with you and what's wrong with life too. So the suffering, the suffering of the trance of unworthiness is that it solidifies this large, painful sense of me, I. We get very self-centered rather than a more fluid dynamic presence. We get very rigid and stuck in that self-focused because we have to hide and defend a flawed self and present something that'll be more acceptable and that preoccupies us. So the suffering is it cuts us off from our naturalness. It cuts us off from our creativity and our love. and our freedom. So our shared inquiry now, because we're going to be moving towards as you know in these kind of gatherings together to reflect as we'll be, I'll be inviting

you to pick an area that you want to explore. Our shared inquiries, how do we learn to stay and be with those ways? And I'd like to offer the pathway in terms of three, overlapping but discrete elements in terms of moving from the trance of unworthiness back to wholeness. And the first is we have to see the stories and the beliefs and be able to step back. So we're not living inside like if you think of a thought like a cloud. We're not inside the cloud. We have to be able to step out. We have to be able to then connect with the waves of living experience, really feel our

feelings. And the third and absolutely essential piece, and it has to really be there all the time, is regard the whole process with some gentleness, some kindness. This whole pathway that we're exploring, to me, it's really the true meaning of courage. I mean, courage means are a willingness to stay and feel the feelings we don't want to feel. That's courage. Let me give you an example of one person during this pandemic working this way, moving through some of the more difficult ways. One man who he was divorced last year, about this time last year in the spring.

He moved, his wife got custody of both children. Here he is in this midst of this pandemic and lockdown, and he's feeling quite isolated. and forced to kind of face his loneliness and deep down a sense of failure. You know, this relationship of 15 years didn't work. And the divorce was his ex-wife's initiative. She was already dating. So he's living with this feeling of he's isolated, feeling lacking, not lovable,

not special, and his children are going to be around other men, you know. So he's feeling hurt and angry and very low. And he's practiced meditation for a number of years, so his attitude was wise that he knew when he and I talked a few weeks ago, actually it was about a month ago, he knew that the way through was to be opening to his feelings. He knew that was the way. So for his first weeks he was really caught in the obsessive thoughts. What should I have done differently? What's wrong with her? You know, so what's wrong with me? What's wrong with her? And they were incessant and he couldn't interrupt them. But starting after a couple of weeks when he was

really aware of that, he found he could start taking a deep breath in the midst of them and step back some and ask himself that question, this is the second part, what am I actually feeling? And so it's just in these last couple of weeks, he started letting the waves of the loneliness and shame and hurt and anger move through. And I'm sharing this because just a few days ago, he told me he actually started the very real and necessary and deep process of grieving. But if he hadn't opened to the feelings of the failure of the relationship and the shame, he wouldn't touch into the grieving, which actually is giving him more tenderness, more space, more open-heartedness.

And he's coming home to his wholeness. And it's going to take a while. This is not like done deal. He still gets knocked around by rogue waves. But here's the point. and this is the fruit of learning to stay for him and for all of us, is that we begin to tap into and reconnect with what is timeless and true about who we are. There is a timeless, formless presence, an awareness, a love,

that's really the truth of who we are. And when we can remember and reconnect with that, then the waves can move on the surface of our being and they can feel very deep but there's still there's still this timeless presence that can hold them and being able to know who we really are and have room for the waves is freedom so you might be thinking as I shared this story about the man going through the divorce well you know his wife rejected him and yes a marriage is a failure but he didn't do anything wrong. And how do you open to the waves of really feeling like you're doing something wrong?

You know, what if the trance of unworthiness is because you really have caused harm? So I want to move to that. You know, how do we work with a sense of personal failure when, you know, we feel like we really have done something wrong? We've hurt somebody. And you might be, as I'm speaking, finding where in your life, that resonates how hard it is to face that, to face real feeling of our own failure, to match our standard of being okay, being good. And so I want to begin right here by saying,

most everybody I know has done things that are hurtful, that have hurt other people and wished we hadn't. And for many, it does lock us into a sense of being, a bad person, a failure, into the trance of unworthiness. We're not good at failing. When we feel like we have not, we've fallen below some basic idea of how we should be, when we feel like our human imperfections glaring and others are seeing it too, which makes it even worse, those are really painful waves. Those are the waves that roll us where we get the sand and our nose and our ears and we really slammed. And those are the ways where we then contract

and we try not to feel. We go into obsessing. We blame others. We rationalize. We mostly despise ourselves and we lock into bad personhood. So what I want to offer is another possibility when we failed because they've given us that we fail. You know, many times. in our lives, in some ways daily. But I want to offer another possibility on how we can respond and turn the moments of failure into a dynamic portal for realization, a dynamic entry into awakening. And I found it's put forward really powerfully in a quote by Samuel Beckett. And the quote goes like this. Fail.

Fail again. Fail better. Fail better. And I want to say that I found this in a wonderful book by Pema Chodran with this title. So you might want to check that out. So the given is this. We do all keep making mistakes. And some are failings in small daily ways.

We say something. We regret. make a mistake on something that really we didn't want to make a mistake on. And often it's the larger ways that really matter to us where we're really causing harm. And what we can do better is shift how we relate to those feelings of failing. Now, years ago, I heard a story about the Dalai Lama that really caught my attention on this. And in this story he was asked if he had any regrets and he said yes he did. And he told a story about an old man who had come to him and asked him about doing certain practices and

the Dalai Lama had discouraged him and he'd said that those practices were really meant for younger people. The following week this man took his life so he could come back as a young person and do the practices. The Dalai Lama felt responsible and when he was asked how he got rid of the feeling, the bad feelings. He paused, he went inward, and then he said, I didn't. The regret is still here. And then he said, and this is really important, he says, you don't get rid of these feelings. You get to know them and find that you can hold them in your heart as part of your being a human being. You can hold them in your heart. You can hold them in your heart as part of your being a human being. Okay, so failing better. Instead of reinforcing the negative

story of I'm bad, which is another way of actually, remember lying down on the ocean floor, like not standing up and just moving forward. It's another way of dying. I'm bad. It's the prison of trance. We can step out of the story. about the what's wrong and open directly to the rawness of the feeling, the vulnerability that's there. And with that, the regret. It's the only way to get to a very healing kind of regret. If we can open to the raw feelings, we can find our way for compassion, compassion for our humanness and for all humans and our imperfections. It's not our fault. We have conditioning that gets us confused and aggressive and fearful.

And the best we can do is start to wake up to it, to see it, to feel it, and to hold it with kindness. And you might say, yeah, but then what if we just keep doing the same thing? But the reality is, and I invite you to check it out yourself, that when you actually open to the raw feelings and the regret, it motivates us to help not hurt other humans. It gets us into a much more real and open-hearted space where instead of repeating the same patterns, we're actually more awake. We live from more intelligence and heart. And so our response then, once we feel our regrets, is a prayerfulness for others and when possible an outreach,

and outreach to those that we've hurt. And Pemetrojan described very beautifully how in her own life, her own places where she caused injury and harm, and how when she wasn't able to reach out to that person, at other times she would in some way be helpful and she'd dedicate the merits of that to that person. So even when we've hurt somebody and they're no longer around, our prayers and our actions on the earth as we move forward can be offered for

their benefit. Regret not making ourselves wrong and bad. Failing better. It's a really a it's a very cool helpful and powerful way to wake up. We get knocked down. What arises is that the waves that are there, we learn to stay with them, to feel them. And then when we're unguarded and tender and open to that rawness, we actually realize the purity and vastness of who we are. We remember the basic goodness and there's room for the imperfections, our being enlarges. So as the Dalai Lama says, the only alternative to that pathway of opening to the waves is to drag yourself down and down. So I wanted to share

personally that this failing better has become over the last five, six years, a very active practice for me. It used to be that when I'd feel like I blew it, I would try to move on but it would just kind of lodge in there. Now in the moments of blowing it, there's some part of me, kind of like a light up in my mind that says, oh, okay, this is an opportunity. Because failure feels so bad that when I can actually open to it, it carries me very far. So for me, feelings of failure come around regularly whenever I feel like I've been insensitive or unkind or too controlling, trying to get my way.

you know, if I give a talk and I don't feel like I was really in it, authentic, you know, and it doesn't feel like it was really there in a live way. So then any of those can give me a kind of sinking feeling. And as I mentioned, there's something in me that gets eager now to turn towards it, not to try to like just know, okay, it'll go away, I'll feel better next time. You know, in the Dharma teacher world, they say you're only as good as your last talk. And that's, you know, it's kind of a joking way of saying that, you know, it's easy for our egos to ride on good person, bad person, inflation, deflation. But if instead, when there's

a feeling of failure, we turn right into the waves, we can wake up out of that ride. So, for me, a recent example is someone gave me critical feedback. about a program I'm involved with. And I reacted too quickly wanting to try to fix it. And I didn't take time to, you know, explore my options collaboratively with others involved. And then I got pushed back and that's sinking a feeling of, oh, there I go again, just kind of charging forward. It's a bit of founder syndrome, you know, thinking I'm going to go take care of things

and not really attuning to the whole picture. okay, failure, you know, feeling of failure. And then that fail better thing, okay, so let's let this vulnerability be here. And what I do often when there's strong feelings as I've shared many times, as I'll put my hand in my heart, when it's a really big, sometimes I'll just sense that my more awake awareness is smiling into the place that is vulnerable, you know, just that sense of kind of that benevolence, like it's okay. And I actually can sometimes imagine the space inside the pain and the fear and the shame, the source where it came from, kind of in that space a smile. So

there's kind of like it's being held with a tremendous amount of kindness. And gradually that presence and that tenderness, there's an opening. So there's just the space for this imperfect self. and remembering that the space, the awareness, the love that's here is my basic goodness. There's such a shift when we open to failure that's possible, from a failing self to the loving awareness that has room, to the ocean that can hold the ways with kindness. You know, I want to just say that I teach a lot about be with what's coming up. And of course, again, when there's trauma, be with it gradually and gently, but be with what's here. And when the waves get strong for me, they still feel really hard in those moments.

It's not pleasant. And I think of all the people I know that have been working on this path and that could they so often encourage people and they've been staying with the waves and I have such deep honoring that it really is hard and it takes courage and yet the gift is so beautiful of realizing who we are beyond the particular difficult wave. So maybe I'll close by saying that often the spiritual path is kind of envisioned like this ladder to perfection. and it's actually more that we're turning around and embracing this world, this life that's right here in all its messiness.

It's not a path to perfection. It's a path to wholeness to being the whole ocean, embracing the different ways of difficulty, the joys and the sorrows. So with that, my friends, let's practice some together. this guided meditation is on relating wisely to feelings of personal failure. Take a moment to find yourself a comfortable way to sit, come into stillness, close your eyes, be aware of this body sitting here breathing, and from a place of presence, begin to scan your life and sense somewhere in your life where you might be feeling some personal failure, something

that's hard to accept about yourself. And it might be something directly related to this global pandemic. It might be something ongoing in a relationship, the way you're handling it. It might be an addictive behavior. It might be something from the past where it's hard to accept how you've harmed somebody or something that's on. ongoing in that way. Whatever it is, bring to mind a situation that reminds you of this. Bring the situation close in. If another person's involved, see their facial expression, perhaps the words that are exchanged. Whatever the situation, see the space you're in, ways you're behaving, thinking, feeling. Become aware as you sense yourself, turn to you

on yourself, down on yourself, what you're believing. What's the story you're telling yourself about yourself? So recognizing the thoughts of the story and on purpose shifting and sensing what's actually going on in your body. What are the feelings of falling short, of failing, of not liking yourself? In other words, what are you unwilling to feel? And as you ask that, just check your throat, your chest, your belly. How are you feeling the waves of this? Feel your earnestness, your sincerity to turn towards. And you might even remind yourself the worst part of this, what really most turns you on

yourself. What are you afraid it's going to happen in the future? What does this mean about you? still feel in your body as if you're stepping forward or opening or leaning into, just invite the wave to be here. Let it be as big as it is. And if it helps at this point, put your hand on your heart to keep company so that you're creating a space of kindness for the wave to express itself. Offer that. Keep feeling in your body, perhaps right to the epicenter the vulnerability. You might sense, as I described, that your awake heart is smiling with

benevolence, with care, into the place of vulnerability, smiling at the fear, smiling at the shame. It's like some larger, wiser place in you. You might even sense the space that the fear that the fear shame arises out of, is filled with a smile. So it's being held in kindness. We begin to sense more and more, that sense of being that ocean, the caring space of awareness, the waves moving through into this room, just noticing the shift from a failing self to this beingness that's here. this is the truth of who you are and there's room for the humanness to move through.

This is from Roshani Ray. There's a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There's a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There's a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There's a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart

as we break open to the place inside that is unbreakable, and whole. I'm taking a few full breaths. You might open your eyes. Thank you, my friends. Thank you for being willing to have the courage to journey in this way together. If you're interested, there are discussion groups that follow right away this talk. You can find the link on Facebook. And I hope to have you with me next week. Many blessings. Stay safe. Stay well. and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.