Tara Brach - Spiritual Hope: Trusting Your Awakening Heart (2019-10-02)

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Spiritual Hope: Trusting Your Awakening Heart - Our beliefs and understandings about reality directly impact our moment to moment experience of living. If we believe we will never change, that blocks the transformation that brings happiness and freedom. If we trust our spiritual unfolding and are open to possibility, that guides our attention and behaviors in ways that evolve us. This talk explores how to nurture mature, spiritual hope—hope that is sourced in trusting our intrinsic goodness, and our capacity for deepening love and wisdom. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

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'd like to begin with a story. It's a classic story that I've heard from many, many different traditions, but the common theme is that there's a monastery that has fallen on hard times and it's got mostly elderly monks and they're kind of caught in their habits and their rituals and routines. And so it's kind of a dying order.

It does not have much pizzazz or creativity or aliveness to it. And so dispirited, the head monk at one point went off into the wilderness to seek guidance from a well-known sage, a wise woman, who lived in solitude in a small hut in the deep woods. And so they practiced together, they meditate, together and he shares what's going on and she says, well I don't have any advice. All I can tell you is that the divine one, the Bodhisattva, the awakened being, is living amongst you. So he returns and he tells all the monks, sorry there's no advice but here's what I found out.

So what happened was in the days and weeks to follow, the old monks pondered that. and it kind of sparked their interest and their way of relating to each other started changing. Kind of wondering, well, maybe it's you, maybe you're the Bodhisattva, and kind of looking closer and paying more attention, noticing the light that came through each other, and maybe the ways another was particularly patient or generous or kind. And of course, on the off chance that they might be the Bodhisattva, they started treating themselves a little more respect and kindness. And people that came by noticed the changing atmosphere.

They kind of felt drawn to the radiance that was emanating from the monastery, and in time more and more asked to join. And within some years the monastery again became a really thriving order filled with service and celebration and love. So what happened? And what we can sense is that the sacred The page basically told them the truth, the bodhisattvas living amongst you, and if you take it even more, a bodhisattva is an awakening being, they were all awakening beings, that's their potential, all of them.

And yet the reminder helped them to begin to pay attention to that and nourish that and wake it up. So, as individuals, each of us, and as communities, communities, when we trust in our innate capacities, when we start sensing our potentials, that trust actually helps to wake us up. It helps us to evolve. And I love one particular line from the Buddha's teachings where he says, I would not teach you about happiness and about your potential for freedom if it wasn't possible. And what I love about that is really the gist of any spiritual path and the value of any teacher from any tradition

is the capacity of that teacher or that path to remind us of the light and the love and the potential within us, our Buddha nature, our nature to awaken. So, I really think of it that you would not be drawn here or to practice or to be listening unless in some way you intuited what was possible inside you and you might think you're you're meditating because you want to be a little less stressed or reactive with your kids or whatever it is but deep down we want to be all that we can be we

want to manifest that wisdom and that love that's that's our potential Let's just reflect for a moment. I'd like to invite you to close your eyes and just imagine in these moments that you can kind of settle in a little bit and if you, in this guided practice, if it feels you're doing an as-if, that's fine. But for these moments, sense what it's like if you trust, you are spiritually evolving. In other words, you totally acknowledge all the human neurotic stuff, the wounds, the insecurity, but still, your essence, conscious loving awareness is here and becoming increasingly conscious,

increasingly manifest that you're evolving and it's increasingly possible to feel your belonging to all beings, and to really relate with kindness, to touch an inner peace. So sense trusting that, this is truth, this is awakening through me. And notice what it's like, what's the effect of trusting your Buddha nature, that it's awakening. Some might consider it a spiritual hope. How does your body feel? an awakening bodhisattva, how does your heart feel?

And as that trust deepens, how might that affect your meditation practice? If you sense yourself as an awakening being, how does that affect maybe your next conversation with somebody you know or what you prioritize later today or tomorrow? You can continue to reflect on this and we'll be moving through some more reflections If you'd like to open your eyes, you can. So as in the story of the monastery, when there's a reminder of our goodness, of our Buddha nature, of spirit,

when there's a reminder and there's some more trust, it actually recruits the power of our heart and our awareness to evolve us more. It allows us to live into our true nature. There's a kind of positive healing cycle that goes on where the more we are trusting that light and love and goodness, the more than we behave and pay attention in ways that cultivates that goodness. And it's kind of in a way a description of grace.

That's grace being in that positive cycle. So as we'll see, and I'm going to speak about this a little bit more as we go on. in science, this power of our heart and mind has been really researched extensively. It's been described in the realm of healing the psychobiological mechanism through placebo studies that show that when we anticipate something good, in this case usually it's healing, when we anticipate healing, we're more inclined to heal. just the way it goes. What happens is anticipating healing activates brain chemistry that actually helps us get healthier. And conversely, when we fear our mistrust our capacity to heal, or to love,

or to be free, then that activates brain chemistry that blocks us. Our brains are really powerful. That's the point. It's called nocebo. There's placebo. When we anticipate, healing and that anticipation helps us heal. It's noceble when we don't think it's possible. We're filled with doubt and we stay imprisoned and stuck. Now by extension, if we trust that consciousness is evolving in our world, we are going to be more energized and activated to serve that evolution. If we think, eh, no go, then we kind of get depressed and hopeless and withdraw. So trusting in having hope for our world actually helps us to act on behalf of our world.

Now I know what you might be thinking, beholding the dramas of our time. So you might take the long view, the long arc right here, maybe geological time. So what we're going to do right now is we're going to come back in an individual way and look at how does your own attitude towards your own path, your own unfolding, affect your path, affect your evolution. And what we find when you're stuck in emotional suffering, okay, when you're trapped in depression or fear or loneliness or self-hate, in those moments your subsisting describing to a map of the world and of yourself that basically believes that you'll fail

or you're not worthy or you're not lovable, basically that things will never change. When you're stuck, there are beliefs like that that are corresponding and of course that those are the beliefs that are tapping the brain's chemistry in a way that keeps you fearful and stuck and down. You'll never change. In contrast, when you're feeling good, when you're feeling a sense of inner freedom and happiness, there is a map in there that has some sense of real possibility. And by the way, possibilities not like grasping after some false thing, possibilities

inherent in the creativity of life, that things are possible, you're open to possibility. So when you're feeling freedom or happiness, there's a sense of openness to possibility, spiritual hope and a kind of trust or appreciation in the goodness of how the world is unfolding and how you're unfolding. There's an illustration, Molinazrudin, Sufi saint and some way a jokester too, is resting under the shade of a tall, luscious walnut tree. And he noticed, he was looking at the pumpkins on the ground, growing on these look at little vines snaking around on the ground.

Then he looked up and squinted to see these tiny walnuts, but they're growing on this magnificent tree. And he said, how strange Mother Nature is. To make plump pumpkins growing on spindly vines, well, these little walnuts have their own impressive tree. Well, just then, a walnut went punk, hit him on the forehead, and he rubs his head, and he picks up the fallen walnut,

and he looks high up towards the branches. of the tree and then he looks over at those swollen pumpkins growing safely on the ground and goes, oh, Mother Nature, you are so wise. So there's this trust that there's a, whatever the reasoning is, there's this world that is evolving the way it's evolving and there's an openness to that. So again, your habits of how you anticipate things are going to go affect your brain chemistry, then affects how things go. And we can't underestimate the power of how that happens.

So a little more in placebo research because I kind of got recently reawakened to it. It's not just, oh, that's the placebo effect. It's a profound lens into the power of our mind, either to heal or to hurt. And so there's a ton of research and it's completely... embraced by the pharmaceutical and medical community, basically the standard for approving a drug is that in order to pass, it has to do a better job improving your condition than the power of your own mind when you're believing that healing is possible.

And a whole lot happens when you believe that healing is possible. There's an incredible amount of research that shows that if you think you just took something that's going to help heal pain, your pain starts going away. It's just that simple and it goes in its very far ranging to quite serious conditions that have shown amazing improvement when people feel like they are on a healing track. And it has a much more deep emotional dimension too when you start trusting that love is possible, that awakening is possible.

I heard a story that a couple of years ago that really touched me about a woman described her family and how her father was absolutely unable to express love. And it had a really a very stunting and wounding impact on the family. In his later days she was able to establish some communication with him but not her brother and the others, and she writes that, she wrote to me and told me how her brother died of brain cancer at 48. The story is right before he died, and his last months, his wife called her and basically, his name was Jay, said that the suffering he was carrying that was so painful was that his father had never expressed love to him. So this woman called her father and

said, look, Jay's dying. He really needs to hear from you. Please, call him, tell him that you love him. And the father clearly had some hard time doing it, but right in the last days, I'll read it, Jay would probably die in about an hour at that point he was blind and paralyzed and hadn't spoken to a week. She called her father once again. He said, you have one last chance. She's going to die today, so her father did pick up the phone. He called Jay, I'm reading now, and told him that he loved her. And Jay, who hadn't spoken for a week, started talking and talked to Daddy for half an hour. Jay didn't even die that day.

He rallied and lived for another month. That is the power of trusting and love. When we have hope that we can experience love or experience connection or experience spiritual awakening, we rally. It calls on many parts of us. It catalyzes the drugs in our brain and some of the research, there's a gallop hall of one million people, the hopeful said they laughed and smiled much more than the hopeless.

Hopeful employees experience more well-being. Key piece is that hope translates into behaviors that then carry us towards what we value. So if you have hope and intimacy, you'll then be more vulnerable and open in your communication. If you have hope for health, you'll exercise and diet more in the healthy way to support it. If you have hope that you can help others, you'll do the trainings in whatever it is that will develop you to be able to serve.

And of course, if you have some sense as I started an intuition in your capacity to spiritually awaken, it's going to help you to meditate. You'll not meditate out of duty or obligation but because there's some something you long for and you're in love with and this helps to bring it alive for you. Now I mentioned our hope in the world and I think probably the most famous quote about this is Einstein's who said the most important question we can ask ourselves is, is this world inherently benign or friendly? Meaning for all the insanity and the cruelty and everything is there's still some basic

awareness and love that's really fundamental. And he went on to say, and this is very interesting to me, he says, if you decide that the universe is unfriendly, then we'll use our technology, our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly. But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe, for belonging to our world. What we believe, what we anticipate, our basic sense of is goodness here, affects our life. So the important inquiry I think for many of us, because most people I know get caught in that

negative looping, we're insecure, we just are. And then we start anticipating what's around the corner that's going to go wrong. How am I going to fail? We anticipate that others aren't going to receive us well. That's usually our default right away. Before we feel welcomed and embraced, we anticipate that something's wrong with us and will be pushed away. So this is a really, this is nocebo.

This is an important inquiry for us. How do we work with that? One example of nocebo, man went to a job interview. interviewer says, and where would you see yourself in five years, Mr. Jeffries? Mr. Jeffries's response. Personally, I think my biggest weakness is in listening. It's kind of a sleeper and I liked it. So here's a story of Nocebo that I thought was powerful. And it's about William James, who as many of you know, a famous psychologist, he came from a super accomplished family. His brother Henry James was this very well-known. known applauded, a successful writer. And William in his 30s was notably unaccomplished.

He wanted to be a painter, he enrolled in, then that kind of crash, he enrolled in medical school, then he quit, he went on an expedition up the Amazon, that didn't work out. So in a moment of reckoning in his diary he questioned if he had the innate capacity to be in any way valuable or productive in this life. Any question if he should be alive at all? Okay? So this is nocebo, right? He was bottoming out but he decided before doing anything rash to conduct a one-year experiment

and I want to pause here and say part of getting out of the nocebo spiral is to experiment and have some interest, like get interested. is if you can start to get interested in your attitude and how it affects your brain chemistry and your activity and their felt experience of the universe, that interest enlarges you so you can start making different choices. Okay, that was my little comment. He made an experiment for one year and this was what he agreed with himself. No matter what thoughts arose, he would keep turning his attention to the assumption the

change was possible. Your basic impermanence, change is possible. And he tracked in his diary and he practiced every day as if things could get better he could transform. So that was his framing. It's like every day no matter what went up he kept, when his thoughts would go negative he'd say, wait a minute, things can change, I can transform. And so with that lens he became more receptive to opportunities. His energy became more engaged. He became increasingly aligned with his deepest interests. And he married, he started teaching at Harvard, he joined a study group of a kind of metaphysical club, and he wrote a letter a year or so later. I possessed for the first time an intelligible and responsible conception of freedom, free to manifest

your potential. And it comes from hope, possibility. And as I'll discuss, not a false hope, but a hope that's actually intelligent that says, Buddha Nature is here and it is unfolding and it can manifest, it's possible. I wouldn't teach you about happiness and freedom unless you had the potential to experience it. Okay, so the point is not to believe something false. It's not those affirmations on the refrigerator that says, you know, I'm getting more attractive and smarter every day. It's not that. It's not, I'll always feel healthy and beat this pesky little death thing, or it's not like I can win the Olympics if I set my mind to it. Or for me it's not, of course the Dalai Lama will want to endorse my new book,

you know. Please, oh please, oh please, oh please. It's not that. That's the shadow side of doubt. When we narrow hope to a particular outcome, that's immature. That's not the hope we're talking about. It's not the hope where you have to have this particular person as a life partner. I'm going to have that or have to have a child or have to have the job. Or one of my more favorite descriptions of hope has to do with a woman who

goes to her priest and confesses that she has a problem because she has two female parrots but they only know how to say one thing and he gets curious what do they say and she blushes but she says okay here's what they say they say hi we're prostitutes do you want to have some fun he goes oh that's obscene the priest exclaims so after a few moments of deliberation he has a solution that comes to mind

you know I have two male parrots very devoted birds whom I've taught to pray and read the Bible. Why don't you bring your female parrots to my house and we'll put them in the cage with Francis and Job? It's great names. My parrots can teach your parrots to praise and worship and speak in more appropriate manner. Thank you, the woman responds.

This may very well be the solution. So the next day she brings her two female parrots to the priest's house. And as he ushers her in, she ceases two male parrots are inside their cage, holding rosary beads and praying. She's impressed. You know, Francis and Job are the real thing. She walks over and places her parrots in with them.

After a few minutes, the female birds cry out in unison, hi, we're prostitutes, you want to have some fun? There's a stunned silence. Finally, one male parrot looks over at the other male parrot and exclaims, put the beads away, Francis, our prayers have been answered. So this is our little investigation into, wise hope and spiritual hope versus... So a little bit more about the shadow side of hope.

And hope is often driven by fear. We're just hoping and holding on because we're afraid we're going to lose something, lose our partner or not get that job. So it's not an openness to possibility because that's really what we're talking about. Another shadow side of hope is magical thinking because all of us know whether it's ourselves or others, people that are always daydreaming and fantasizing coming up with a new idea of how to make a fortune and that's not just open to possibility.

That is magical thinking and it's often got self-delusion and grandiosity. Naturally there's certain stages of development where these different things are appropriate. One woman describes her seven-year-old who says, are you the tooth fairy to her? another tooth had fallen out. And she wasn't sure whether to answer this magical part of childhood. But since she asked, she said, okay, it must be time. And so she let her know she was right, you know, and the little girl seemed to absorb this information pretty thoughtfully and several hours later she came back to her mom and said,

so what I want to know is how do you get into the other kids' houses? So we have our ideas about the world and we grow out of them. What we're talking about here is liberating hope. It's the kind of trust not that life is going to work out according to our ego's demands. It's really much deeper. It's a hope or a trust and really the seeds of what's already and always here inside each of us, this awakening awareness. So part of our process is to see where we've narrowed and open and deepen what we're

really longing for. So I share a personal experience with that which was, many of you know I spent a number of years struggling with fairly serious illness and it impacted my mobility dramatically. And so some days when there was less pain I could move around and I could walk and so on, some days I'd very easily re-injure myself because my joints were really unstable. This is a connective tissue, a disease related to the pre-mutation to fragile acts, so my tissue's loose. I'm a lot better now for many, many reasons, but during these years I injured very easily.

And so I was living on this roller coaster for the first while, where some days when there was less pain and I could walk some, I'd start going, oh, I'm getting better, it's going away, you know, and I'd really, really hold tight to that, like really wanted that, which is quite natural. And I'm not thinking it wasn't, it was a bad thing, but that's the way I was going. And then on bad days when I'd re-injure and call them bad days and I was really limited in what I could do, I'd get very dejected and I'd feel hope, kind of my hope go away and there'd be that doubt that it'll never change. I remember one particular day, it was really a difficult one because I had thought I was getting

better and I actually tried a new trail that I had a little bit more up and down because ups and downs were hard for me. But within five minutes I had to turn around because I was in such bad shape and I sat and meditated and I was feeling that nocebo dejected, I'm never going to, this isn't going to change and I'm losing what I love. This is that real sinking. And so the only thing I knew to do, which is what we practice here, is to stay. Just stay with what's here, be present with what's here.

So I stayed within the thoughts were there, I'm never going to heal, and my life is going downhill, and then with that I could feel the sinking. And then as I stayed, the sinking went into grieving. There was a real, you know, I was weeping and it was very very, and it was very, very deep. And I stayed, feel it, be with it. And as happens, whenever we stay with our experience, it keeps moving on. And in that passing through there was a more intensified sense of presence and quietness and openness and tenderness.

This is the gift of staying really. And I just felt this sense of, well, this is really what I long for, is this presence. You know, more than am I better and my worse, because here I was in one of my worser phases, but the real longing is beyond this body's particular state. It's this quality of, it was a homecoming back home to really deeply present. And I remember opening my eyes and I have a fern in my bedroom. And I was really awed by the way the light was the delicacy of the leaves were caught in the light and it's just ordinary and exquisite.

It was just absolutely beautiful. And it was exquisite and pleasurable because I was just so receptive. It was like all of a sudden there's possibility again to live fully, but it wasn't in a certain way hitched to my small hopes. It was to live from a place of awareness. And so this was a real important. important shift for me to watch in my consciousness of how a smaller hope kept me on a roller coaster but this hope and it's possible to be awake and aware and open-hearted no matter what's going

on, that possibility actually activated me in a certain way and energized me to engage and whether it was with the Fern or re-engaged with my life in a different way. It was a real changing So how it's come to me is that this kind of trust brings grace in our life. And grace isn't that good things happen to us. Grace is that we trust that the goodness is here. We trust that we are essentially good. And that trust actually brings grace because then we're available. We're available for beauty and for one-being.

beauty and for wonder and when things are really painful for compassion, for tenderness. So I want to explore for the rest of our time together more how you can cultivate that spiritual hope, how you can come out of the nocible spiral of doubt and something's wrong and something's going to go wrong and I can't trust and I'm going to change and move into that sense of the potential that's in the wholeness and the healing and the goodness that's already inside you. And one way that's very, very powerful is that whenever you even get a taste of your Buddha nature,

of your spirit or soul or awake heart, in other words, a moment of wonder, a moment of gratitude, these are all expressions of spirit, a moment of love, a moment of compassion, pause and really let it fill you. and sense how more than any story of yourself, this is more the truth of who you are. This being of wonder, this being of compassion, this gratitude, this tenderness, is more the truth of who you are than any of those stories.

And that starts shifting from subscribing to the nocebo map to opening to that realm of possibility that actually draws what you long for to you. Another piece is to deepen your commitment to staying. In other words, when difficulty comes up, use the portal of presence. Because the greatest gift of this practice is if you, instead of pushing away what's difficult which locks us into a small resistant scare itself, you actually open and say, okay, let me be with this. You become that openness, you become the presence itself and you discover again the goodness that actually gives you hope and trust.

So learning to stay. The last piece that I want to mention is I sometimes teach a meditation on the future self. And that meditation, another way of saying it is, it's a meditation on the who you are when the goodness in you is fully manifest. You can think of it in terms of time but it's already who you are. You already are an awakening bodhisattva. So it's a meditation on that and we're going to close tonight with that meditation because it's very, very powerful to be able to sense, okay, who am I really?

and can I call on the wisest part of my being? Can I call on the most compassionate part of my being? And the more you turn towards that and call on it, the more it comes forth. It's the same mechanism. If right now you say, okay, I want to experience this moment from my highest self, you will be resting more in that awareness than you were a few moments before. It's a little bit like William James did it, you have to act as if and do it a number of times, but then that Bodie self emerges.

This is Henry David Thoreau. He said, though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. you have the seeds of Buddha nature. You really do. To begin to trust that and nurture it, to use the portal of presence and to call on it when you feel caught will help to bring it forth.

So I'd like to practice this future self-meditation in just a few moments but I just want to say we started with the monastery. The Bodhisattva is among us. And the truth is it's really, really you. It's not someone else. It's a spirit and a light and a love that's living through each one of us. And your path, if it's to be a path that really blossoms, is an invitation to start paying more and more attention to this possibility of manifesting that light inside.

you. Part of what helps it to manifest is to live from it in your day. In other words, if you just do a meditation and say, okay, I'm an awake bodhisattva self, you know, that won't do it. It gets drawn forward in the moments in the day that you extend to somebody with kindness and then you start sensing ah that feels more at home. Are you generous? Are you expressed gratitude? So I'd like to invite you if you want to explore with this whole path of liberating hope and trusting and goodness to the next person you speak with this evening or tomorrow, sense that you're speaking from your awakening heart-mind to theirs.

Act as if and it'll call it forth. Okay, let's practice together as part of our closing. If you need to adjust it all, please do so that you're in a comfortable posture as well as you can be, closing your eyes and coming into stillness, and feel as you begin some interest and some sincere openness to this exploration. Let it come from your sincere longing to awaken your heart and mind. You might take several long, deep breaths to collect your attention, see if with the out-breath you can release any time. that's accumulated in your body.

See what wants to let go? And as I move through this guided practice on the future self, feel free to substitute for yourself words high self or awakened heart or the bodhisattva within me, whatever words point to the most evolved expression of your being. Now you might scan and sense if there's any places right now where you're feeling emotionally stuck. We talked about nocibo, the

the kind of spiral where there's doubt, thinking I can't change, something's going to go wrong. So you might take note if there's something going on in your life where there's that patterning playing out. Now imagine you could journey into the future and you could go ahead 10 years or 20 years depending on how old you are if you're older than less years. So what you're doing is you're going to be encountering your future self, which is an older, more awake, evolved version of yourself. It's who you are when spirits really awaken you, when awareness and loves really awaken you.

So you're moving ahead, 5, 10, 20 years and you might visualize your future self's home. You might picture where your future self is in this home or maybe outside and maybe there's a place in nature nearby eye and see how your future self looks. You might notice certain clothing, hair, mostly facial expression and the look in their eyes as you meet. Visually noticing the look in their eyes the welcome, the kindness, the peace, the presence,

and notice what their presence feels like, what it's like to be with them, the quality of acceptance, true acceptance. Imagine a sense that you're letting your future self know about whatever feels most challenging right now where there's some stuckness and vulnerability where you feel insecure or mistrusting yourself or others, afraid that things aren't going to change. You might sense what you most need from your future self, whether it's feeling loved or valued, and then allow yourself to take in the response of your future self, how your future self in some way energetically through words or through touch, communicates, care, acceptance, reassurance.

How does the most wise and loving place in you respond to your small self and let yourself be nurtured by that. And before leaving, find out what message your future self wants you to remember, some words of care and wisdom that can serve you in your current life. Now take a moment to imagine that the awareness and wisdom and heart of your future self is filling you completely. So as you return right here to this moment, sense how the spirit of your inner Bodhisattva, of your most devolved being lives in you now and always and is available and knowing that with practice you can naturally deep in trust, deep in the access to your awakened heart and to live from that loving presence with increasing ease, spontaneity

and freedom. We close with a poem from the poet Rumi. You were inside my hand, I kept reaching around for something. I was inside your hand but I kept asking questions of those who know very little. I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money, to climb over the fence and take my own vegetables. vegetables, but no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I'm the crescent

moon put up over the gate to the festival. Namaste and thank you for your kind attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.