Tara Brach - Stress, Presence and Freedom

Episode Date: June 30, 2010

2007-10-31 - We are designed to respond to stress with flight/fight/freeze and this can proliferate and then harden into our ongoing response to life. The practice of presence, of recognizing and relaxing with what is arising, can cut through this conditioning and gift us with the realization of our true nature and the capacity to love fully.

The topic of our reflections or the theme tonight is both very mundane in some ways and profound, which is stress, stress, and how the quality of presence that we're cultivating can actually transform our experience into one that's liberating. But really how we work with stress. And it's really a seasonal talk. It may be that not everyone here has this, but with the day shortening and holiday that coming up, that has everything, so much to do with consuming and speeding up and traffic. And I think it's partly for me because I'm on the Beltway more than I used to be that I'm noticing it.

Halloween, you know, I spent a lot of years where I was, my biggest angst was getting the right amount of candy. Like getting too much, I always felt like what a fool I am, and it felt so wasteful, and getting too little and seeing the disappointed looks on those innocent faces, you know, when they got two candy kisses, you know. So, and then the pounds of stuff I'd never buy from my son, my dog would die if they ate, you know, that I'm handing out. So that was the stress for me. But it's more than Halloween and it's more than the holidays.

There's something that just, when we speed up, I've said many times in here, shared that the Chinese syllable for speed is heart-killing. That's the meaning of it. And Thomas Merton talks about the pace of our culture, our speed as a kind of violence, of violence to our own bodies and to the natural rhythms, that when we're speeding, we can't touch into that heerness that really has, everything to do with listening or being there for another person. And it really has everything to do with listening to our own hearts, staying resonant with what matters in our own heart. So when we're

stressed, we are physically and mentally designed to speed up. And we have, you know, the built-in mechanisms of fight-flight freeze. Every one of us has that. And mentally we get busy trying to figure things out. Have you noticed how much time you spend trying to figure something out? You know, not important, not the deep stuff, like the meaning of like level,

you know, even that can be a waste of time, but, you know, just like just over and over again, just trying to figure something out. When things are stressful, there's this kind of inquiry. What else can I do? To in some way relieve this chronic anxiety. one little girl told me her favorite Halloween riddle, which is why do mummies have so much trouble making friends?

It's because they're so wrapped up in themselves. But I liked it because, you know, when we're stressed, we're wrapped up in our agenda. I mean, that's the bottom line that when we're stressed, we're trying to get things done. and our mind narrows and fixates and speeds up and our body tightens and we're not available. We're not available to ourselves or our world.

The more concerned we are about something bad around the corner or about falling short, the less capacity for intimacy. It's just direct correlation. So one of the great Zen masters put it really, really well. He said to be free is to be without anxiety about imperfection. And that's one of the mantras or teachings that I think deserves a lot of reflection, to be without anxiety about imperfection. And my understanding of imperfection is just the messiness of being human, you know, the emotions that come up, not because we want to have that emotion, but they just do,

or the obsessions that we get caught in and we each do. The reactivity that we have, the ways we act out and we wish we hadn't. It's just our human conditioning. And imperfection has a feeling of off-balancedness or not okayness or something needs attention. It's stress, basically. So just to invite you as a way to begin this inquiry to close your eyes, I want just to check in for a moment for yourself. And as we do when we check in, let this be a pause so you can almost just drop in right now to hearness.

Just feel yourself here. Feel your breath. Feel the sensations that are here. And you might sense where in your life right now, what's the main stressors? what we might call the imperfections in yourself or in others that you're in relationship with, with their in the relationship. What's a key stressor that has things feeling imperfect right now? It might be the stressor is your own behavior, maybe an addictive behavior,

or maybe the imperfection as a way that you're reactive with your partner. or maybe the imperfection is something to do with your health, something that feels not okay. And just for a moment, imagine what it would be like if you were without anxiety about this imperfection, that the behavior, the thoughts, the feelings were there,

but you didn't add on some anxiety about it, that you let yourself relax with it and say, okay, this is how it is right now. And what if you accept your life just as it is right now? Just for a moment. Like you don't have to keep doing it. You can go back to being at war with how your life is. Just in a few minutes, I promise.

You can think it's not okay. You can go back to fixing. But for just a moment, just a little bit. Try it out. What if for just a few moments here, okay accepting everything exactly how it is

this body these behaviors just for a moment like a profound it's okay it's okay that it's imperfect now we'll go back

to this but it's an interesting inquiry as to if we can get a glimmer of that without anxiety about imperfection the glimmer has a taste of freedom to it We get a sense that there really is a space that has room for life in its different expressions.

And if it's very difficult to say, okay, absolutely unconditionally yes to how it is right now, then we can begin to say, what really stops us? And what most people find is that there's this fear about relaxing with how it is, that if we relax about how it is, if I relax about my relax about, my controlling, judgmental, lashing out behavior, then I'll just get worse. It'll just get out of control. It'll go crazy. That will never change. That will get passive. That will resign to things. If we accept life as it is, we will not do anything to stop the wars in the world or the injustice. There's this fear that if we're without anxiety about imperfection, our own

in the world, that everything will go crazy and get worse. We are very hooked on being vigilant. Now imagine, and this is just an imagine, some of our earliest mammalian ancestors, little rodent-like creatures scurring about in the shadows, right after the last dinosaurs. And the ones that became relaxed, just open and enjoying the pleasant sensations of a good meal,

warm rocks, sweet-smelling flowers. Crunch. They got eaten because they missed the sound of a slither nearby. Right? These were the guys that were without anxiety about imperfection. Crunch. So the ones that lived to pass on their genes were nervous and jumpy. They were quick to notice threats and to remember painful experiences. Now, that tells us a whole lot, doesn't it? Some of you are scientists here and know about, you know, just if you look at evolution, or science, there's a good reason that we are rigged to be vigilant. So if you feel like, you know,

why can't I just relax and be easy going? Well, it's your nervous system that's nervous, you know, and it was given to you. And it's not your fault. So there's same circuitry is alive and well in our brains today that we are rigged to scan for what can go wrong. And when we inevitably find negative things, because, you know, there's painful stuff that goes on. It gets stored immediately and it's made available for rapid recall. Whereas pleasant stuff enters a different part of our memory. It's like we are biased towards the negative to survive, okay? Now the challenge with this, somebody described it this way.

Some of you might remember this. A linguistic professor was lecturing to his class one day. In English, he said a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language. We're in a double positive can form a negative. A voice from the back of the room piped up, yeah, right. So I'm bringing in a little bit of the science to say that our emotions have an intelligence.

And they tell us what we need to do to take care of ourselves as mammals, as creatures on this earth. You know, like a good athlete, if ideally we notice something that needs a response, we respond, we put out effort, our heart rubs up, the pulse goes quicker, we do the job, and then when we stop, we come back to rest, and there's not like we're still fleeing from a monster. We're, you know, we come back and resume normalcy. Here's the problem, and here's where the suffering is. That we don't do that usually. We live in a chronic sense of something's about to go wrong. For most of us, our nervous systems have become habituated to, constantly apprehending, oh, around the corner, something is going to go wrong, and we need to tense

against it. And what happens is it proliferates, and the way it takes shape in us humans is judgment, that we are hooked on constantly judging ourselves and others. We're hooked on it. We get caught in all this emotional reactivity of shame or anger or fear. And so it's not just a healthy response to a immediately presenting environmental challenge. It's our nervous system ends up getting habituated. And this is what the Buddha called suffering, that we leave home, we forget the place of listening, of presence, of open-heartedness, and we're in a chronic state of fight-flight. So someone says to us, well, just relax.

and that's like an insult. Have you ever noticed that? Like that's one of the worst insults. First of all it says you're uptight, relax, you know. But even beyond that, we can't. We can't just go, oh, just relax. Like when you hear the guided meditation, just feel the breath come in and open

and receive the breath and just release with the out-breath. How easy is that? The mind just trips off into something else, right? I mean, if you have a voice for a while, you can stay with it, but left to our own devices, just relax. That's not our habit. So what goes on for most of us, and this is the kind of basic Buddhist teachings

in its Austin Western psychology, that when there's pleasantness, rather than just feeling the pleasantness and maybe wanting some, but just enjoying it, we get hooked on how do I get more, and it's going to be gone soon, and maybe I don't deserve it in the first place. you know, that kind of thing.

When it's unpleasant, you know, our body gets geared to, we've got to get away. When it's unpleasant and even, I mean, it's not that we shouldn't try to deal with unpleasantness, but some unpleasantness, we can't, like some of the things about aging and getting sick and dying, we can't control. But there's this tensing against, and there's a sense when there's unpleasantness

that we have to do something. So we get caught in this chronic sense of have to do something. We're living with this kind of restlessness that always puts us into, they call that human doing, you know. One of my favorite examples. A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing. His eyes are rolled back in his head.

The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator, my friend is dead, what can I do? The operator in a calm, soothing voices, just relax. Take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line.

He says, okay, now what? You know, it's pretty bad, I know. The truth is, try when you feel this constant impulse to do, to pause, to not do and see what happens. See what happens. Find out what's underneath that impulse to do. We spend a lot of our moments being driven by a kind of vague existential clutch of sensing something's wrong. Something needs attention, not enough done, have to do more.

It's not so easy to pause. There's a word in the Tibetan tradition, Shempa, which is this kind of stickiness that keeps us hooked on doing more, resisting, grabbing. It's this conditioning that in some sense is constantly driven by this not enough, something's missing, something's wrong, experience. And then there's the Shempa that gets added to Shempa, and that's what I want to talk about, which is, we could each examine the ways we get stuck. And each of us has our patterns of how we respond to stress. And some of us go into neurotic busy doing, and some of us freeze or then eat a lot of food to kind of quiet it down,

and some of us get blaming the other person that's not doing there. We each have our strategies, right? We do. Then what happens as we start waking up and wanting to really be a more free, open-hearted being is the next level of Shampa is we start really disliking ourselves for our Shampa. That's Shampa on Shampa. Shampa squared. It's really deadly. It's really hard. In the Buddhist tradition, there's a story where the Buddha's teaching one of his disciples and he's saying, you know, if I

shot you with an arrow, what would you do? And basically he says, you wouldn't then shoot, oh, if you shot yourself in a arrow. You wouldn't shoot yourself with another arrow out of anger at yourself for shooting yourself with an arrow. You wouldn't add the second arrow of blame, right? So it is, and then he goes on to say that when there is pain, it's inevitable, but suffering is optional. Imperfection is inevitable that we get this shempa, this stuckness, this reactivity. It's inevitable that we each have strategies to calm ourselves down. to try to get what we want. That's inevitable.

It's optional whether we then add on the shampa of bad person, something's wrong with me, I'm not okay. Notice when you pause, if you really check inside, if the undercurrent deep down is a sense of in some way personally falling short, failing. So there's stress. There's the reaction. to the stress and then there's a reaction to the reaction. And one of the most powerful things

you can do as you begin to pause and check in a sense, what's the attitude I have right now? Is there an attitude of I'm blowing it, I'm failing, something's wrong with me? Check. Because if that gets included in the light of awareness, there's a dissolving of some of the Shempah. There's a freedom to sense presence again. the underlying principle I'm talking about has to do with karma that everything that we do creates the seeds or the ground for what our future experience that this causes that

so each time we believe anxious thoughts our judgments each time we speed around overdoing or criticizing we're setting the grounds for more anxiety and that the way that we change our karma our karma, if you feel stuck in a pattern of chronic anxiety or chronic depression or chronic feelings of woundedness or victimization, you fuel it by continuing to have the same thoughts and behaviors. How do we cut the chain? How do we wake up from the trance of stress and reactivity? To pause and notice what's happening in the moment. To stop. To see, to see,

take the risk to begin to make friends with what's right here rather than acting out of what's here. There's a place in the bull ring where the bull feels absolutely safe. If he can reach this place, he stops running and can gather his strength, get renewed. He's no longer afraid. From the perspective of the opponent, the bull becomes dangerous. The job of the Matador is to be sure the bull does not have time to occupy this place of wholeness. Okay, so in the bowl room, there's a place in the bullring where if the bull can get there, there's a kind of power and safety.

It's called carancia. As human beings, carensia is within us. every one of us has a kind of still place, a wholeness, a place of heart and presence that if we can pause in the midst of stress and instead of play out our strategy, which just keeps the karma rolling, right? If we can pause and find cadencia, that's the presence, the awakeness, the tenderness of being right here, if we can do that, then we can do that, then we can, actually have found the gateway to wholeness. We have broken the pattern of stress and reactivity.

So the bottom line is that our karma continues in a kind of tight, anxious, selfing way when we play out the same patterns and we cut through it when we can pause and begin to relax with what's unrelaxed. Begin to be not anxious about what feels not okay. Give you an example that really touched me, which was that the Dalai Lama was being interviewed a few years ago by a psychologist for his book, Art of Happiness. And the question that the interviewer asked was, did he have any experiences of guilt or remorse? And he said, guilt, but remorse, maybe. And then he told a story, and he told a time of when an elderly monk had asked him about doing some yoga exercises

that were designed for young people. And the Dalai Lama recommended to this elderly monk that he not do them because he was too old for them. And then he found out soon after that the man committed suicide so he could be reborn in a younger body. And so the interviewer said, well, how did you get beyond the pain of those feelings?

And there was a long pause. And then he said, I didn't. They didn't go away. They're still here. I just don't allow them to drag me away. To drag me away, to pull me down. I just let myself feel them. What I think is powerful about this is that he didn't add the second arrow.

There was loss, a horrific loss, sadness, seeing how, you know, he maybe he could have been sensitive in a different way. Who knows? But that's not the point. The point is that with the imperfection, the stress, the hurt, the pain, he didn't add another layer that dragged him down into the small self that blew it without anxiety about imperfection. Didn't mean he didn't care. Doesn't mean his heart wasn't in great sorrow. He didn't add the second arrow. So this is the really a radical pathway of discontinuing the chain of karma, which is what happens whenever we're stressed, which is really to pause and recognize what's going on inside us instead of acting to be with what's there, to try to relax with and allow what's there. In my own life,

probably one of the best training grounds has been the stress of parenting, and it's very easy to fly in the face of the imperfections of mothering, the sense of the identity of a bad mother that I'm blowing it. And the themes have changed over the years in terms of what goes on around it. But there's some basic sense of whenever I am wanting things to be good for my son or afraid they're not going to be good, I get controlling. I put in my opinions and I try to direct the conversation and I try to direct his life and existence and every time I do it it creates distance every time I'm anxious on behalf of him and then that that's stress and then what happens is I act out on it and I inject something to the conversation or I bug them about something on some

level I've created distance now this doesn't mean there's not a place in mothering for giving your opinion, are offering guidance. But that's not the energy I'm talking about. I'm talking about bugging and needling and controlling. And so then what happens is I do it, it creates distance, and then I don't like myself. And then in not liking myself, I create more distance. So that's the kind of carmic chain. And so I started a practice when Narayan was in high school. Oh, and the reason it's come up now is because he's a senior in college and what's he going to do with the rest of his life? And he's not doing anything to find out, you know, that kind of thing, which is fine, which is really fine. So I watch myself in these conversations, and I notice the conversations end really quickly,

like you all of a sudden gets busy and has to go when I start asking the wrong questions. So what I've started doing is I'll pause before we talk together, and I'll just sense, okay, I'm going to pause a lot, and instead of saying the what I want to say, just feel it in my body, just let it come, let it go. And it becomes a lot more of a creative, alive, rich, spontaneous experience than when I play out the mothering controlling thing. The main thing is that if I do slip, I just, I pause and feel myself tightening against myself and just let that be part of awareness. In other words, what's the attitude? Oh, not liking myself right now. Okay, that in awareness. In some deep way, this is my version of finding

Carrancia, kind of a stillness as I'm engaged with him. So tonight I'm talking about using the word stress and it really has to do with any time in our lives we go into some chain of reactivity where we speed up, shut down, get into controlling, judging, and how do we we interrupt that pattern and find a deeper sense of love and freedom. That's the inquiry. And it's an inquiry that deserves our attention for the rest of our lives because it's about really living fully.

The training we do here is the grounds of that. That when we get quiet and notice that the mind has gone off and in its chain of reactivity, we go, oh, thinking. We pause. We don't judge the thinking. but to begin listening. What's actually here? That's the question. What's actually happening? We pause and feel our bodies and I invite you to do it right now just to feel your body and sense if there's any kind of a clenching or tightness here. How does relaxing our body happen?

You know, you might clench your fists. Why don't you try this for a moment? Just clench it. Just feel a tightness in the fist. Now how do we unclench a clench? The first step is you have to really know the clenches there, so feel the clench and know what's happening. And then explore what does it mean to unclench? Relaxing is actually discontinuing the doing of the clenching. You can't say just relax and do something, it's undoing the doing. Now just as your eyes are closed, just feel your body. is there anywhere else you can undo a kind of unconscious tensing?

Because tension is the body's way of not allowing life as it is. Can you let go in the shoulders a little? It's really letting go into naturalness, into more of a flow, a movement in an inner way. What does it mean to relax our hearts? It means noticing how our hearts are tight, Just noticing and see what happens if you bring a relaxed attention to the tightness in the heart. Just breathe with it.

It said that a relaxed attention is the deepest form of love. That's how we express love to our inner life, to each other, is a relaxed, non-controlling attention that notices and allows. these are the words of Sri Narasar Gadata and just meditate with them he says all you need is already within you only you must approach yourself with reverence and love self-condemnation and self-distrust

are grievous errors your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself all I plead with you is this make love of yourself perfect all I plead with you is this make love of yourself perfect

deny yourself nothing give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them you are beyond our deepest stress is that we're at war with ourselves that is our deepest trap, the shampa, the stuckness, is being at war with how it is inside us.

So what does it mean to say make love of yourself perfect? It's not loving the story of yourself. I love this controlling self. I love this successful self. That's not what make love of yourself perfect means. It means relaxing and allowing your attention. attention moment to moment with the experience it's here, an intimate attention, in the same way that we make love of another perfect, allowing them to be just as they are. Full presence with

another just as they are. Last year, I co-led a compassion retreat with a few teachers from different traditions. One of them was Thomas Keating, Father Thomas Keating, Christian contemplative. and he described the method of meditation, the contemplative practice he taught as bringing consent to what is, which is very similar to what we're exploring tonight, that if we get stressed and we go into a chain reaction of trying to fix, trying to fight, trying to numb in some way being at war, we cut through by consenting to the moment. We're not saying, oh, for the rest of my life I'm going to be passive, but we're consenting just to this moment. So he teaches about receptivity or relaxed presence with what arises and says it's important for all spiritual traditions to grasp the idea that we can send to the present moment versus

making an effort that has to do with the future. His teaching says, transformation is to be there versus getting there. So just to kind of sum up and we'll do a little meditation together in a way tonight I'm talking about the risk of relaxing our conditioning is to be vigilant and it serves when there's situations that require it but we go on full full blast and we don't stop so really the invitation to each of you is to explore during your week taking the risk of pausing and relaxing in the face of stress of not playing out your normal strategies. The poet Rumi says,

be ground, be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender. Be ground, be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.

You've been stony, for too many years. Try something different. Surrender. So maybe as just to kind of close when we say wildflowers will come up where you are, what are the gifts, the wildflowers that arise when we take this risk in the face of stress to pause, when we take the risk to stop the war and just be with what is? And one of the wildflowers is that we make room for loving. If we're busy reacting to stress, we're not able to inhabit the love of our hearts. I mean, that's clear with me and my son. If I'm busy trying to fix him or direct him, I'm not just taking in where he is. And you can review your own lives and sense when you're with dear ones and when you maybe like

that mummy are wrapped up in your agenda of reacting to stress, how available are you? Really? So that's one of the wildflowers that arises when we cut through this chain reaction to stress and pause more. There's more loving. One of the friend of mine described being in a grocery store in California, she said as we snake through the aisles, we became aware of a mother with a small boy moving in the opposite direction and meeting us head on in each aisle. The woman barely noticed us because she was so furious at her little boy who seemed intent on. pulling items off the lower shells.

As the mother became more and more frustrated, she started to yell at the child, and several aisles later had progressed to shaking him by the arm. At this point, my friend spoke up. A wonderful mother of three, and founder of a progressive school, she had probably never once in her life treated any child so harshly. I expected my friend would give this woman a solid mother-to-mother talk

about controlling herself and about the effect this behavior has on a child. braced for a confrontation, I felt a spike in my already elevated adrenaline. Instead, my friend said slowly, hmm, what a beautiful little boy. How old is he? The woman answered cautiously. He's three.

My friend went on to comment about how curious he seemed and how her own three children were just like him in the grocery store, pulling things off shelves so interested in all the wonderful colors and packages. He seemed so bright and intelligent, my friend said. The woman at the boy in her arms by now and a shy smile came up on her face, gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. She said, yes, he's very smart and curious,

but sometimes he wears me out. My friend responded sympathetically, yes, they can do that. They're so full of energy. As we walked away, I heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. We'll have your favorite.

Macaroni and cheese, she told. So that's the first wildflower I want to mention when we begin to pause and arrive in what's here, even when it's that uneasiness and that feeling we should be doing more. The second is more aliveness, that when we're in our stress reaction, it's very hard to enjoy the brilliance of the autumn sky and leaves, the smells, the sounds, are the laugh of a child, are the feeling of the breath. It's very hard to be intimate with anything.

Storm Jameson writes, there is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There's only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

So stress is inevitable. The trance, our reaction is optional. And when we catch on, when we pause, we begin to discover a love and an aliveness. It's always an already here, but it's obscured because we're just so busy getting on our way somewhere else. And in that presence, there's an arriving in what the Buddhists call Buddha nature,

which is a real profound quality of awareness and openness and stillness and a mystery. One poet said, we're managing things so mightily so as to cover over this great mystery we're a part of. So I just want to mention that as perhaps the final wildflowers that we reconnect with this mystery we're in

when we're not so busy managing our lives. So let's meditate for a few moments together and then we'll close. in this pause just let the mind relax open listening letting the sounds wash through you listening to and feeling the aliveness

in the body if there's a stressful part of your life calling your attention just sense what's happening perhaps what you're believing is going to go wrong what you're afraid of

what comes up in your body when you tune into this. And just sense the possibility of offering a very awake, kind presence. Just breathing with the feelings in the body, sensing the space, the presence that lets you know the possibility of being without anxiety about imperfection. that there's room for this life just as it is that what stressful can actually be part of what wakes up our hearts and minds

what invites us to deeper presence alive kind and awake be ground writes roomy be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are you've been stony for too many years try something different.

Surrender. Namaste. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.