Tara Brach - Shifting from Limbic to Liberating Intention

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Shifting from Limbic to Liberating Intention - Becoming conscious of our intentions is the first step to truly aligning our life with our heart. This talk explores identifying when we are being driven by grasping and fear, and ways we can bring compassion to unmet needs and discover the deeper longing – the liberating intention – that guides us to 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. I begin tonight with one of my favorite stories that took place in 2001 and this was three weeks before the Twin Towers were bombed in New York. There was a conference that I attended in the Twin Towers. I still have the little pen that I took from the building. It was a Buddhist conference and I was asked to help open the conference with six other or five

other teachers and they were all elders. I was by far the young end of the spectrum in my Dharma experience and I was also the only woman and I was really nervous about this. This was stressing me out. We had ten minutes each. and we were asked to address really the question of, what is it that most helps to serve awakening and freedom? So we had 10 minutes to riff on that one.

And I was a second person in line and I thought that's great. I get a chance to kind of compose and collect and so on, but I get the thing done with, you know. And so the first person went up there was Richard Baker Roshi who was Suzuki Roshy's Dharma Air very, very well. well-known and beloved. And so he gets up there to do his talk and he said, awakening comes down to two things. Intention and attention.

Thank you very much. And I'm all of a sudden like, oh my God, I'm on. So I was stunned and frozen and I got up and I have no idea what I said. I wish I had said like he said. But I did remember what he said, that awakening comes down to intention, that we have a conscious heart intention to be free, which then guides our attention to presence, intention and attention. The Buddha said that our entire life arises on the tip of intention. It's a very powerful statement that whatever in a deep way our motivation is, that's going

to determine what we think, say, do, and our destiny. So this evening's reflection is really how we remember and live from our deepest intention. I often explore this at the beginning of a year because many people use beginnings as a time to refresh and reconnect. And we also know how inevitably for most of us the intention becomes kind of compartmentalized and how often we forget and it doesn't become a living part of our day. So really that's the exploration. How do we bring these alive?

When Zen teacher put it this simply, he said, the most important thing is remembering the most important thing. These Zen folks have a way of doing that, you know. But when we remember we're aligned with our hearts and as we know when we forget, it's because we're stressed and then we go into some sort of a flinch reactivity that we can sometimes regret. And such was the case. There was a seaside monastery and three monks were out in a boat and they got caught in a kind of mini tsunami and dragged hundreds of miles from wherever their monastery was and dumped on a desert island. And so they kept themselves alive for several

weeks and then they found their way to a cave and in that cave there was some zaffoos. to sit on as they sat in the cave and it turned out that the spirit of the cave started speaking to them in an echoing voice that they had found their way to the feng shueve place on the island and if they properly assumed zazen they could have three wishes each of them could have a wish so the first one says I want to return to the monastery I miss the morning bills and the beautiful gardens swoosh he disappears the second one says I too want to return to the monastery I miss sitting at the feet of my beloved abbot, swoosh, he returns. The third looks around and gets really disoriented.

He goes, these friends have in my son, I miss them. I want them back. So, our intentions are layered. This is probably the feature we're going to keep coming back to the most. And some arrive from our more primitive brain, our limbic brain. And that's the wants and the fears and the emotions that drive us. And some come from our more recently evolved brain where we have this capacity to see the bigger picture. We have this capacity for perspective and for mindfulness and for compassion and for sensing a mutual belonging. And some of our intentions come from there.

So we're going to really be looking at how to move from limbic-driven intentions to liberating intentions. That has a kind of nice sound, doesn't it? limbic intent to liberating intent. That'll be the name of the talk. So anyway, the basic teaching here is that you might have a kindness as a deep intention for your life. For myself that's part of my morning prayers is, you know, in some way please may I be kind. Please teach me about kindness.

And so you might have that also as like really deep and yet know that, no how easily when you get stressed your intention just flies out the window. So you might be driving and you get stressed and you might end up cutting off people and so on and kindness is no longer what's ruling the day. So what this means is that it's our degree of presence that determines what kind of intention we're in touch with. the limbic often takes over. And when it takes over, what might seem like reasonable decision-making

if we look close as being driven by intentions that come from fear and wanting. I've always loved this from Chief Justice Douglas. He says in the court that he participated in, the Supreme Court, 90% of the decisions arose from emotion and 10% was used to rationalize that emotion, which gives you a feeling for the impact of limbic intent. And so if we investigate ourselves and I'm going to ask you to do it in a daily way, you know, what was today like? How much was your choices and your actions driven by a sense of imping

patience or restlessness or self-protectiveness or judgment aggression and how much came from the deeper intention, you know, may I be kind, may I be creative, may I help serve and you might just close your eyes for a moment and check in and this isn't to judge but as much as to become aware. What was today like? How much of today were you in some way chasing after something? or restless or avoiding something, or trying to get more comfortable. How much do you feel you were remembering the most important thing?

In one of her poems Mary Oliver's kneeling and praying in a field and she's contemplating with a wonder or grasshopper who's gazing around with enormous complicated eyes and here's what she writes, tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? You can open your eyes if you'd like or if you enjoy listening with your eyes closed, that's fine. So, as mentioned, you may have in your mind a sense of what most really matters to you. And yet as we know, we all get overtaken by the wants and fears of our limbic system.

Every one of us, we can really see it on a societal level. And it's important to notice that many would say that there's a current spike in fear around the globe and our nervous systems can kind of feel it and the more fear and feeling separate comes together. So along with a spike in fear, there's more us-them. It just happens. There's more of a tendency to put down others, to punish or violate others. When there is fear, we see it directly in the racism in our society.

In those of other religions right now, Islam becomes a focus for Americans are a hatred of Americans, it's the hatred and the violence just picks up. And we can see how it's then fueled when leaders are caught in a kind of limbic reactivity and they do aggressive acts, culturally insensitive acts, horrific acts, that then just spur on more cycles. I know you understand what I'm saying. It's just part of, it's not bad people, it's a limbic hijack that happens culture-wise. And we can see it the limbic grasping and decision-making that happens around the climate

that when there's greed, those that have power and money don't want to face climate change. So we look at what's happening in Australia, the worst fires ever recorded. Enormous devastation, billions of animals or a billion animals. I mean, can we even imagine that? And yet the prime minister is saying that the allegiance to coal, fossil fuels, propelling the problem, that there's not going to be any reduction in a reliance. I'm bringing this up because this is an example of intention on a societal level that is being driven by greed.

And of course that's everywhere, I'm mentioning Australia, but it's the same greed is everywhere. Whenever there is greed as intention, it undoes what rational minds know. It can't take science seriously. So when there's greed in the tobacco industry, you don't see the science on tobacco until much much later. Same thing with sugar. Same thing with the dangers of meat consumption for individuals in the planet. So we can also see this on an individual level.

What happens when there's a hijack and we lose ties? with a higher intention. And you can watch it for each of us when we're hijacked by greed or by craving, it's me first and it's us having to have our way and we're not sensitive to others' needs. When fear is running the show, what happens? We judge, we push others away. One woman told me one of her hugest openings was, do I want to be right or do I want to be open-hearted. When we want to be right, that's the limbic hijack again.

So we're looking at this but it happens in a daily way in very small ways where we move through the day and it may be that instead of presence we become hijacked by the intention to look good. One woman and this was some years ago described her experience in at New England, she would go to summer there and she went and she vacationed the same town as the actor Paul Newman. And one of the things she would do is every Sundays would go and get a hut fudge Sunday or one of her favorite Sundays at the bakery and one Sunday she goes in there after her, she goes for a jog and then goes in there and there's the renowned actor with his baby blue eyes

and dazzling smile. And her whole thing is okay, keep it together, look good. Don't look in his direction. You're a grown-up woman. You've got three children. And so she's doing this whole thing. You know, this is the intention to look good. And she gets her Sunday or I think might have been on a cone actually that she was ordering

and she's paying the clerk and she glides out whether to look in his direction but when she gets to the car she realizes that she doesn't have her ice cream. Oh, God. must have left it in the bakery. So she goes back in but it's not on the counter and finally she looks over in his direction and he says, you put it in your purse. So what happens to us is that in small and big ways when we lose track of our deeper intentions to be present, to be spontaneous, to be real and we get caught up in the smaller-minded intentions, it causes us trouble and I like the way Thomas Merton put it.

He said, the rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form of contemporary violence, to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want I help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. So we begin to look at our own lives and really ask that question, how much am I aligned with what really matters in my small moments, my day-to-day life and in the bigger ways? And for many of us, it's not until there's a kind of quake in our life until something really very challenging happens till you know the refrigerator falls or

on the ninth floor or whatever, you get the idea that in some way we remember, wow, you know? I remember hearing some years ago a story about a woman, a younger woman who got breast cancer and she was told she had a year to live and she had a one-year-old daughter and her mantra became, I have no time to rush. So we can see how it happens when we have the wisdom of mortality advising us, we do then begin to say, okay, what matters? The vantage point, and I often do meditations and we may do one tonight if we have time of the end of our life looking back, is actually just shines the light on what we're missing.

Rumi writes, Gamble everything for love if you're a true human being. Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. He's so amazingly contemporary, isn't it?

But can you feel that, that, you know, if we're at the the end of our life, what would we say matters? Would most of us say that today I live from love, that I felt love, that I was alive here? And yet I'd say sometimes what I encounter and I run this a lot when we do, when we have meetings that retreats and so on as an undercurrent of disappointment. I feeling like, well I feel like I'm kind of like gliding over the surface kind of trying to take care of all the problems but not really arriving. So let's look at now what helps us to awaken to move from the kind of dominance of limbic intent

to liberating intent. And here I'll share with you one of my favorite quotes from D.H. Lawrence. He says, men are not free doing just what they want. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes and there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving. So again the message is it's layered and we're not happy if we're operating off of the surface layers,

the immediate flinch response of fix this, do that, solve that problem, protect yourself, defend yourself, be right, that is not going to make us happy and we can go for decades. That's the mean-spirited roadhouses. Where the freedom is if we keep remembering to dive every day, because this is an everyday practice to remember what really matters. We're going to look at it in terms of two ways of remembering and one is an actual practice of sitting down and saying, okay, what's my deepest intent?

And we do that sum in here. Every time we do a meditation we start by feeling the heart and sensing at least what's the intention for practice. So we're going to talk about that a little bit more how we can actually in our meditation on purpose deepen our sense of what our intention is. But I first want to spend a little time on daily life because the biggest challenge is when we get stressed out and we are at a mean-spirited roadhouse, how we go, wait a minute, wait a minute, this isn't where I wanted to land.

I really want to be living more from my heart. I really want to be more creative or spontaneous or present. So what we do is we start noticing our habitual ways of leaving and then in the midst of that we ask what's my intention. And we start noticing how often, how many moments what we're doing is to look good to meet others' expectations to fit in. One of the stories I've always loved and who knows if it's true but it's a great story is Franklin Roosevelt and it said that he often endured long receiving lives at the White

House and it was hard for me because he complained that nobody actually connected. They didn't actually pay attention to what he was saying. So there was no real contact. So one day he decided to try an experiment and as he went down the line he shook everybody's hand and he murmured to them, I murdered my grandmother this morning. So the guests responded with these phrases like, marvelous, keep up the good work. We're proud of you, sir. God bless you, sir, you know, things like that. It wasn't until the end of the line he was, he was, he's reading the ambassador from Bolivia that his words were actually heard. And non-plussed, the ambassador leaned over and whispered,

I'm sure she had it coming. So it takes some attention to make a deep dive to recognize, okay, I'm behaving to get someone's approval, to make an impression, I'm trying to be right, you know, to making the deeper dive, what really matters. I'd like to give you an example that touched me. One woman I was working with some years ago, she was a long-time meditator, and she had decades of kind of alienation from her older sister.

She had been kind of the one in the family that was the traditional bad girl, you know, the one that got into trouble a lot, said the wrong things, was more alternative and so on. And her sister, you know, just kind of didn't want anything to do with her, but their dad had died, their mom was unwell, they were kind of forced together with her for the holidays and so they had to be together. So there it was and it's Thanksgiving and mom's sleeping and they're kind of, they're talking and about, you know, what's wrong with her and so this woman started weighing in, she, you know,

again she was alternative-minded. She started saying, well, I really think she needs to go gluten-free because she's really having a lot of gut stuff and maybe celiac disease and she's less meat, I mean with her heart like it is, the cholesterol, you know, and the omega supplement she needs. And her sister kind of interrupted and she said, I know you're into this stuff but you're no doctor. Well, as you know with family conflicts it doesn't take much for something to go stab them the heart, you know, and that's what it was.

And it kind of, she laughed back and you don't have to be a doctor, know about good nutrition, but it escalated. She left the room and it was just a repeat of hundreds of times with her sister of feeling completely put down, disrespected and so on. So she started practicing with it and I don't know where she got to do a timeout but she started asking about her intention because that is such a powerful question. When you look at what's just happened, you say, well, what was my intention? What was I trying to get?

Well, she was trying to get respect, which is a fine thing to do. She was trying to be seen and she wanted to be right. So she just admitted that to herself and she felt the very young place in her that wanted respect and always felt like she was made wrong and she offered self-compassion. Now I'm going to pause here and say, When you're investigating intent and you find a limbic intent, like like me or prove of me, you know, etc., the idea is not to say, oh bad, this is limbic intent, the idea is to sense the unmet need and be kind.

That's the only way you unhook from limbic intent. Does that make sense? Okay, so she saw the need to be respected, to be important, to be right and she offered that young part of her care. And then she asked herself, what's my deepest intent? And her deepest intent was to connect, was loving connection. That's what she really wanted. It was like the approval and being important was a way to mattering to being loved, okay?

That was her deepest intent. And of course she couldn't get it as long as she was going after getting the respect, she couldn't get it. So she had this prayer that she released the demand that her sister treat her a certain way, just released that demand in her mind. So there she is, she has her intention and her intention is just connection and the rest of the evening was more relaxed, didn't need to, nothing major happen. They got together again at Hanukkah and there was more ease and they kind of laughed

over some family story and later that evening your sister told her what a tough time she was having with her teen and something had shifted and her sister even said thank you for being such a good listener. And for this woman she could feel how she was coming from really more of her awake, mature true self by not demanding her sister treat her a certain way, not trying to be right, just remembering her intention to connect. And in some way for her it was the difference between my will and my heart's will. Like her will was, I want to be right, I want to be the knowledgeable, I want to be respected,

her heart's well was I want to connect. So again this is one of those, do you want to be right or have love? Do you want to be respected in a certain way or do you want to have connection? And for her remembering that, brought her closer to what she really longed for. So I want to invite you to do a reflection, we're going to do something similar to this. We're just going to explore your intention in relationship and I'm going to invite you now, if you will, to bring to mind some situation where you encounter some reactivity with somebody that's close to you and not this is not where you have a major unforgivable

clash. We're talking about just some tension, some conflicts, some reactivity with somebody in your life where you end up getting angrier or hurt or whatever it is and once you have a person in mind see if you can bring to mind a situation that's representative of what happens. that person does a certain behavior, says something, doesn't do something they're supposed to do, some situation where you're reacting in a way that you perhaps wish you wouldn't. When you have that in mind and the situation in mind and you kind of follow it to where you're reacting, why don't you pause there?

Ask yourself, okay so what's the current intention driving this? What am I trying to get? So, some unmet need here for, feel like somebody is, if they care about me they'll do something a certain way or is your intention to have your way for another reason or something you're afraid of, you're trying to protect yourself in some way, trying to feel safe, what's your intention in the way you're reacting currently? You're trying to control the person so that something different will happen? I'm just going to feel into that more limbic reactive intention and whatever it is, whatever

you're really wanting, fearing that's driving you. Regard the part of you inside that's really behind that with kindness, offer kindness. For some it's really an important time to pause in any deep way, perhaps put your hand on your heart and say I'm sorry, I care about this suffering. care. You can't get down to a deeper intention if that part is not taken care of. Diving requires compassion. And if you feel that you are with yourself, that you've offered kindness, then ask the deeper question, what really matters here? If we were at the end of our lives something came up, what would I want to happen? What really would matter? What do I want

with this person really. What's my intention? And you might sense if you're connected with that intention, how would it guide you? How differently might you respond? What different choices might you have if you could connect with that? And what can you learn from this exercise that you're doing right now? What seems important about it? What's your takeaway? There's a saying that if you want to stop to be kind, you must swerve off and from your path. And in a way our path when it's left up to our survival brain has got a lot of controlling and judging and selfing involved.

So it means waking up a lot. There's a lot of pausing in this practice so that we can become aware of the intention driving us and then trace back to our most awake intention. Now here's the thing that many of you are aware of the phrase neurons that fire together wire together, that we've got habits and many of us have very strong neural pathways of operating off of the more survival brain intentions which is quite natural and pervasive and if we want to change that we have to pause a lot and ask this question. You know, what's really going on?

What's driving me? Can I bring kindness there and what really matters right now to ask those questions? But here's the good news is where attention goes, energy flows. And if you bring it to your deepest intention, if you even just remember that something matters, it becomes more energized. The beautiful thing about this practice, and this is the reason that you know, that is the reason that and not to wait, is that it can carry us through the most difficult situations. If you remember what really matters, when you hit the hard stuff, your intention can carry you.

And one of the examples I love about this is a woman Jan Adrian. She founded Healing Journeys, which is women that there's support groups for cancer. And her story is a really interesting one. And at one point she had a chest x-ray and she had already gone through cancer and treatment and so on. She had a chest x-ray to see if her cancer had metastasized to her lungs and the doctor called and said, well, there is a nodule on the lung and we need to do a CT scan and she got that on Wednesday and she's supposed to get the results the next day.

Now she had already been through a lot and she had started this healing journeys group and and so on. So she knew the whole deal and her anxiety's over the top. She couldn't concentrate, she felt like crying all day, whatever it's metastasized, all the healthy diet, exercise, etc. hadn't made a difference. She calls the doctor's office twice. She's promised that she'll hear back. She doesn't. Thursday night comes. She reads and meditates. That's when she said, okay, Now I'm caught in, I want to live, I'm afraid I'm going to die and the kind of fight-flight freeze dominating. How does she come to something deeper?

And she really reflected and reconnected with her deepest aspiration which really has to do with make me an instrument, you know, use me. In some way her prayer was, may this life serve something larger. And built into that is a sense of belonging to something larger, which does save us by the way, knowing that. Knowing that you belong to something larger, knowing that your being is sourced in awareness and love, that there is some larger formless belonging is what carries us through this living, dying world.

And her prayer, her deep intention to serve for her. the larger good. That's what she started reflecting on. So I'm reading now, she says, she says, who knows what if having cancer against the way I could be most useful, a support to others? And something in that she trusted whatever was unfolding is part of serving, part of loving, part of belonging. So that reflection gave her a huge amount of peace and calm. The end of the next day, she finally got the results. And there were a lot of the was nothing to worry about. And she celebrated. She was glad that there was nothing to, you know, she preferred health to not having help. But here's what she wrote, she said,

it had put her in touch with what most mattered, loving, knowing her larger belonging, and also the inner knowing that I will be okay no matter what. And that's one of the gifts of knowing your deep intention is it puts you in touch with belonging in a very deep way. She says, I'm not just a body. Someday I know this body won't go on and I will still be okay. I like being reminded of that periodically. I am often asked, how do we know if what we have is a liberating intention? How do we know if it's a liberating intent? And there are three characteristics of liberating intent that I want to name because I found them really valuable when I'm reflecting myself.

And one of them is that what we're longing for, what our intention is, is in some way to manifest the fullness of who we already are. It's kind of the heart's call of our heart for homecoming to the fullness of what we already are. I love this story of the Bantu tribesmen who, their children, be in a hut and they'll go around the hut to each sleeping child and say their prayer, be who you are. In a way that's our intention is to be all of who we can be, which means the fullness of love

or wisdom or creativity. To give a contrast, what would not be a liberating intention would be the aspiration to bike across the country which is a great intention but it's not a liberating intention. because this doesn't have to do with manifesting our full potential, to create an app, for instance, Samadhi, to make sure our partner uses the app so it'll change them too. These are not like liberating intentions. All right, so that's the first one. The first one is that it has something to do with manifesting our potential.

The second is that it's embodied. If for an aspiration or intention to have power, you have to really feel it as a living embodied aspiration. You have to care about it. This is Oprah Rinfrey. She says, before you agree to do anything that might add even the smallest amount of stress to your life, ask yourself, what is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it's right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it. Okay. So one, One, our aspiration or intention has to do with the fullness of our love or wisdom or awareness. Something to do with manifesting.

Two, we care about it, it's embodied. And number three, it always relates to this moment. Okay? So it's not like, you know, oh St. Augustine, here's a good one. Dear Lord, please give me chastity and consonants, but not yet. So it's not that. It's not something that we're planning to do down the road. It always has to do with something that we want to experience right here and now.

Please may I be kind, may I live from kindness. Please may I remember the goodness of who I am. Please may I express that loving. It's that kind of thing that we can do right here and now. We start right where we are over and over again. Notice the intention of this moment and then do the diving. We're going to practice a little right now so you might adjust how you're sitting. So as you close your eyes we're going to be reflecting on deep intention and what we've

been exploring is that the more that we remember what matters, the more that we remember what matters, the more our daily choices, our actions, our words, will be guided by that intention. In some way, remembering our intention allows us to more fully live from our goodness. The more we reflect on what matters to us, the more we'll connect with it. It says the poet Aface said, he says, ask the divine for love and ask again, for I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most. So we talked about how to trace back intention when we're caught in a kind of more shallow or survival kind of intention, grasping, judging, fearing.

And this last practice is really how we can just explore right this moment, what's the deepest intention? And begin by inviting yourself into presence. Let your senses be open and awake, listening to sound, feeling the aliveness of your body as it sits here, this breathing body, and feeling your heart right now, whatever the mood, emotions that are here. If you knew you had a year to live, how would you want to live your life that year? What would matter to you?

What would be most important? What would your deepest intention be guiding you through that year? If you had a month to live, assuming you could, you're not encumber too much, how would you want to live? What would you do? And what would be that deepest intention that would be in some way guiding you? What would matter in your moments? If you had a day to live, how would you want to live that day?

What would your deepest intention be? What would matter? How would you want to experience your moments? And if you're at the last few minutes of your life matters. What's the experience that matters? the knowing that matters. What might guide you? And if you bring that right here right now, what matters in this moment? What's the prayer of your heart? What do you want to remember? Over and over, what do you want to remember? May all beings awaken to the longing of their

hearts. May all beings be carried into belonging, into vast love and awareness. our true home. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrak.com.