Tara Brach - The Earth is Crying in our Hearts

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

The Earth is Crying in our Hearts - The suffering in our world arises out of a sense of separation—from our own bodies and hearts, each other, and this living web.  These two talks explore this trance of separation and how it's led humans to destroying our larger body, earth. We then look at the pathways of awakening to the truth of "interbeing" and responding to our precious world with love.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome, friends. It's good to be with you. So along with many of you, I have great sorrow with the passing of Ticknaudhan. He helped to awaken hearts and awareness across the globe. And one of his great contributions was to remove the false separation between spirituality and how we live on this planet, how we relate to each other, how we relate to this earth. So he removed the separation between spirituality and activism, you know, acting on behalf of all beings. and he was a true bodhisattva,

meaning he just was an awakened being. He really modeled it in his piecework. And in recent years, real dedication to like a focus on the degradation of our planet. One of the teachings that I found so central and powerful, and he coined the word interbeing. And the teaching is really that we really can't heal our world or understand what we are if we don't understand interbeing,

which is that our existence is entirely intimately interdependent with every other living being, that every moment we are shaped by, influenced by, our experiences molded by and created by, the lived experience of every other being. It's kind of if you imagine a wave in the ocean and how it's entirely shaped by every other wave and by the moon and the planet and the rotation of the planet. So the power of this is that if we realize interbeing,

our hearts will naturally feel a sense of belonging and care for all of life. And these are his words. He said, change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same. You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

In that insight of interbeing, it is possible to have a real communication with the earth, which is the highest form of prayer. in that kind of relationship, you have enough love, strength, and awakening in order to change. This is the experience that underlies transformation and healing. So, given the great crisis and suffering of our living planet, I couldn't think of a better way to honor Ticknaudhan's spirit than to focus on what might bring healing to our larger body, this earth, and we'll be exploring that this week and next. I was very touched when I read that when someone asked Ticknathan how to save the world, he said, what we most need to do is hear

within us, the sounds of the earth crying, the sounds of the earth crying. So I thought the title for these reflections together would be the earth is crying in our hearts. And during these two talks, we'll do several reflections. I'll be inviting you, including this one, to do some journaling. So you might have something nearby that you can write on. And my sense is that our inquiry begins with looking at how feeling separate, how forgetting our interbeing, forgetting our belonging leads to violating or neglecting our living web. This is the suffering of separation. And it's a sign of being in trance that we're disconnected from reality. Many years ago, I was attending a workshop with another beloved spiritual teacher and social activist Joanna Macy.

And I'll be referring a lot to Joanna. And she shared an illustration during that workshop that ever since when I am talking about this domain, I try to bring in. It's from one of the legends of the Holy Grail and the key figure is Parciful, who's a young knight on a quest. And he wanders into this parched and devastated land where nothing grows. And when he arrives at the capital of this wasteland, he finds that townspeople are behaving as if everything is normal, business as usual. They're not wondering what horror has befallen us, what can we do? Rather, they're dull and mechanical as if under a spell, which they were. So Parcifal is invited into the castle where, to a surprise, he finds the king in bed, pale and dying. And like the land around him, the monarch's life is waning.

So Parcifal is full of questions, but because he's been told by an older knight, the questions are improper for one of his stature, he refrains, he keeps quiet, and the next morning he leaves the castle to continue his journey. But before he goes far, he meets the sorceress, Kundry. And now Kundry hears that he hasn't asked the king about himself, and she goes into a rage. How could he be so callous? You know, he could have saved the king in the kingdom by just extending his care and his inquiry. So taking her words to heart, Parsifle returns to the wasteland, and he goes straight to the castle, and without even breaking his stride, he walks right up to where the king is lying on his couch, and he kneels there and gently ask, oh, my lord, what aileth thee? And in those moments, the color

comes back to the king's cheeks, and he stands up, he's fully healed. And throughout the kingdom, everything comes back to life. The people are newly awakened and they talk with animation and they laugh and sing together and move with a vigorous step. The crops begin to grow and the grass and the hills glow with the new green of spring. So it's very compelling to look at the nature of trance of suffering. How when we get cut off from our own bodies, and hearts from each other and from our living earth. When we get cut off from that sense of interbeing, we're not able to heal or to love each other fully

and the earth becomes an ever-increasing wasteland. It's not until we acknowledge the pain, feel it in our hearts, offer our presence and care, the transformation happens. So maybe stepping back a bit, I'm aware that at times we can hear the topic of, you know, the crisis of the planet, you know, the horrors of climate change and it's on the front pages and it's humanity's biggest problem and something happens that there's a kind of glazing over or maybe impatience or irritation or, okay, I already know about this one.

and for some I've got more immediate challenges right here. And I know that while that response can arise, there's also something else going on. And I know many of you, and I've heard from you, have contacted a really deep distress on behalf of our beloved earth, despair, grief, urgency, anger, you know, on behalf of the trees, the streams and the endangered species and those who are really vulnerable. And what's key here

is we need to feel. We need to grieve. Again from Joanna Macy, she says, don't ever apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It's a measure of your open heart. And as your heart break, open, there will be room for the world to heal. That is what's happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time. It's an adaptive response. So in your personal lives, if you've healed through great loss or failure or heartbreak, what allowed it to happen was you felt what was going on. You agreed. You opened to what was there. And maybe a pause here just to reflect as we widen our attention to our larger body of the earth,

just to sense what you love in this natural world that you'd miss. You know, what part of this natural world do you feel intimately connected to in love with, that sense of interbeing? And maybe it's trees when you're in the first. forest. Maybe it's certain animals. Maybe it's a sound of a clear stream as it goes around rocks, or maybe it's the sea. What is it that you'd grieve losing as it becomes more disheased? There's so much. You know, 150 years ago, Chief Seattle asked us, he says, what are humans without the beasts. If all the beasts were gone, humans would die from a great loneliness of spirit.

For whatever happens to the beasts also happens to us. You know, we belong to that same living field as do the endangered species, which include, you know, three out of four subspecies of gorilla and three species of whale, the black rhinoceros, the Amor Leopard. it'll take a concerted attention and remembering not to lose what we love. And as I know for so many of you, this waking up's been going on for quite a while. It has for me, including real alarm and grief. And for many of us, as we're going to discuss this more, we can have surges of that of alarm and distress and sorrow and then you can get reburied in our daily trance.

But first, maybe just to share, you know, my first spiritual experience. It was around when I was 12 years old, before I had any concept of spirituality, I was on a family trip, and it was Easter vacation, and we were in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, part of the Appalachia. And we're actually, it was Easter morning, and my father set up a kind of egg hunt, you know, around in the woods, right around us. And I wandered off. Maybe I was getting a little old for that stuff. I don't know. But I was sitting on an outcropping of rock and looking at the expanse at the sky and those gently rolling wooded mountains, really so beautiful and graceful. It was completely quiet. And it was a really distinctive moment because I knew I was touching what mattered, what I loved.

what was beyond and within and at the very heart of life, I fell in love with nature, which means I fell in love with my own being more, because I am nature too. And those mountains bring me back. I return to them over and over again that appellate your range. So it's hard to describe the impact.

When I first heard of mountain talk removal to mine for coal in Appalachia. The range, it's a little south of where we spent time. It was like, you know, cutting off the head of a friend. It was this violence, this desecration, there's the pluding of the air, and those beautiful streams and all the wildlife. And, of course, there's been increasing research showing

that those who live in some proximity, huge health crisis with lung cancer, as we know, this crisis of the earth, it's not about, just about the future. It's here. Every day there's this violence violating of our earth. Every day, places, and we're reading about it in the news where more and more vulnerable humans and non-human animals are suffering from our warming planet. And I wanted to share what brought this really front and center for me most recently and for so many

was watching that Netflix movie, don't look up, broke all sorts of records. And for those that haven't seen, it's a parody of our response to climate change. And the theme is that the Earth will get hit by a meteor in six months, and it's sure to cause a kind of cataclysm for all life forms. And two astronauts are trying to get the word out into a world that's in a trance, like the world Parsifle entered, where people who deny it as a hoax,

or other distractions are put out that draw people's energy elsewhere, people assume it'll get worked out by those who know better. But there's not this real registering of, oh my gosh, this is danger to all of us. And for some of those in power, they were actually trying to prevent a response to protect their privilege to exploit for their own benefits is frightening and, of course, familiar. Well, I was glad I watched and regretted watching it right before I went to bed. And my second regret was that I should have refrained from sharing my alarm that night and the next night right before bed with Jonathan.

My timing was bad. This is the unpleasant side of interbeing, I guess. But, you know, regardless of, you know, many different reactions to the movie from the public, but it got people talking more about climate change with each other. And we don't really talk about it. I mean, we don't talk about how we feel about it and we need to. You know, it needs to be real to us for us to respond. I saw a cartoon with a caption, the caption Senior Moment,

and it's a pair of elderly dinosaurs on rocks surrounded by rising swirls of water, and they see Noah's Ark at a distance pulling away. It's got all the other animals on it. And one is one dinosaur saying to the other, so this was the day? So it's here. You know, as most know, scientists are describing what's going on as the sixth major extinction, that the Earth's currently in an inexorable process of a massive dying off. And its threat is to potentially all current species,

including humans. We have only a small window of years left to avoid the most cataclysmic dimensions. These are things we know about. There were five extinctions on this planet before. with a great number of life forms disappearing, four of the extinctions were from volcanic activity. One was a meteor. In Earth's history, 99% of all life forms have gone extinct. So this happens. This isn't like something weird or surprising.

This happens. And globally, you know, especially because of climate events that have been so violent, And more and more people are recognizing intellectually that this is the sixth round. But do we really get it in our bodies and our hearts? That we are living in a time of extinction on the planet. Do we get it in a way that lets us grieve? That it's us. It's our bodies.

It's our beloved's bodies. It's the Earth's bodies that we're part of. And are we sharing what we're feeling with each other? So the frightening reminder of Parcable's fable is how deeply, even in the midst of all this, we can be in trance and narrow our attention to our most immediate needs and wants and not attend to the calamity that's right here, to the dying off of the living web.

Ticknodhan, in one of the things he wrote, said, in my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed. The metaphor in Buddhism, which describes this plight of the deluded ego self, just focused on its own wants and fears and joys and pleasures and so on, is a children playing in a burning house, that when we're caught in our reactive, egoic mind, we forget a larger truth of who we are. We don't realize our belonging to each other to this earth.

We don't realize the awareness, the love that really is our shared source. So there's a useful way I find in understanding human evolution that lands us where we are today, which is that the primitive psyche is fused with the one. It's not self-aware. It's called the participation mystique. We're one with our world like a child and a womb. And then we emerged into egoic self. And there was self-consciousness,

more distance from the world, more ability to observe and measure and judge and strategize, and a focus on a separate self and an unreal other. or it could be us and them, but there's a sense of an outside world that's unreal. We're going to come back to that. The third stage, which many are evolving into, is realizing who we are beyond that separate ego itself. This is interbeing, where we sense our belonging to a web of aliveness and to all beings.

And it's really the world knowing itself, you know, that we can then participate in the world with kind of grace and love and wisdom and act on behalf of the greater good. So this is the trajectory of evolution towards greater holes, towards belonging, towards interbeing, realizing interbeing. And this evolution is our hope for the least amount of suffering, for the most care for life. And I know for many the big question is will this awakening of consciousness, will this awakening of consciousness be fast enough to avert the most extreme suffering. And along with that question is the recognition of our challenge, which is the egoic trance that plays out in our personal lives and our collective life. It's very strong. The primary future that I want to

emphasize of this egoic trance is unreal othering, that when we feel separate, others become unreal. And we can see it in a kind of a daily way, just that when we're stressed, let's say you're driving on a highway and you're stressed, everyone else, they become traffic. I just think it's such a funny idea. It's just like everyone else is traffic. Or we can sense it how when we're stressed, everybody else becomes part of our agenda. Like either there's somebody, an object that we want something from their cooperation, their approval, their attention, their money, whatever. Are they become an object that is in some way threatening? They'll judge us. They'll get in our way. They'll take something from us, including our time. Are they just really causing trouble?

You know, they're objects to oppose. And again, from on the road stories, a man's driving home from work. It's been a really tough day, a whole lot of conflict. His wife calls. him on a cell phone and she's distraught and she says that she heard on the the radio that someone is driving the wrong way on the highway and it goes heck Emma there's hundreds of them doing that so it's silly but we know what it's like when all of a sudden we realize that we're blaming everyone and you know what's what's the story here you know we're finding fault Unreal othering is profound in its impact because if others are unreal, it cuts off our sense of empathy. We don't register their suffering and we can harm them.

They're not a part of me. And the earth becomes an unreal other and we can't register the earth's suffering. We can't hear the cries. So this is the predicament of the egoic trance in relating to climate change, extinction, the suffering of the most vulnerable, there's a sense of other out there, and it can be abstract and intellectual, but it's not real and it's not my problem. And to say that most everyone spends time in egoic trance, even if we've touched and rested in something much larger, we get caught in our self-focused stories.

So if you wonder how it's possible that you can know about the sick extinction, you can know how much suffering there is, but somehow rather don't feel the grief or the urgency or move to respond, this is the, you know, species conditioning that we've got with this egoic trance. And as I mentioned, for many, we get glimmers of surges of knowing what's going on and feeling horror and feeling care. But then it gets buried again. And we go back into feeling more small-minded. And then we can feel like it's overwhelming and we feel powerless. It's just, then we kind of numb out. And I'm sharing this because I witnessed, myself at times deeply open and heartbroken and caring in response to the suffering that's happening

and that I know is growing. And at other times, the suffering of our world can be much more of a like a far distant notion that there's others out there and it's removed from the immediacy and the privilege really of my life. And that's the egoic trance. And when I'm in it, my response to suffering comes more from a sense of moral rightness, but not from love. And I'm sharing this with you because it's so important to be honest with ourselves and to be forgiven. You know, we live in a collective trance.

And it's fueled right now by a lot of uncertainty and fear. You know, we're filled with distractions and we're increasingly. disembodied, disconnected from our heart and from that sense of interbeing. So let's pause again and just take a moment, if you will. Bring yourself right here, take a few full breaths. I invite you to bring your own curiosity and honesty, not judgment, just a care and interest to your own life. how it is right now, especially where there's stress, just to notice, okay, so here's how the

egoic trance takes shape, the sense of self-concern, the sense of perhaps being defensive or protective of your time in a way that others become in position sometimes, maybe. just notice how the egoic trance, when your stress shows up in the way you relate to others, where you might get impatient, where they become unreal, where you lose that sensitivity and that caring that comes from realizing we belong. You might widen and sense what we're exploring this domain of the earth's pain, and sense does it seem abstract to you like it's happening to unreal others those who are vulnerable the animals the non-human animals that are most suffering the trees does it feel like

others problem does it do you feel like it's just too big so just noticing how you see the egoic trance affecting how relating to the dying of life on earth and feel free now or at a point when we're done with this talk to journal some. So our inquiry really is what wakes us up from the trance from the unreal leathering. And what we find is the movement to wake up comes from its pain. There is pain and separation. There's pain when we get self-centered. There's pain. when we don't feel belonging, when we feel cut off. And it shows up in a number of ways. The more separate we feel, the more anxious we feel. It's like there's a world out there and bad things can happen.

And the more separate we feel, the less intimacy. The more we get caught in blame and anger and conflict. And when we feel separate, we feel guilty and ashamed like there's something wrong. something feels off. Usually we think we're bad, that we're failing. But what's off is that developmentally, our sense of being is confined in too small a container. We're living in an egoic trance and not experiencing the love and the ease and the freedom and the sweetness of interbeing. So if you find your suffering in any moment,

It is a signal of the egoic trance that you're living in too small a container. It's a way your awaking awareness is trying to get your attention and energize you to widen your sense of identity, to remember a larger belonging. And it's similar with our collective suffering. Our dying planet is asking for our attention. It's having us feel the pain that will then require us to respond. Let me share this from Wendell Berry. He writes, it is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane and more than half.

To destroy that which we were given in trust, how will we bear it? in clod and cloud, worm and tree, that we driving are driven despise in our greed to live or haste to die to have lost wantonly, the ancient forest, the vast grasslands, is our madness, the presence in our bodies of our grief. Let me share this with you from Wendell Berry. He writes, It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust, how will we bear it? To have lost wantonly the ancient forest, the vast grasslands, is our madness, the presence in our very bodies of our grief. so it's the pain, the loss, the struggles of those most vulnerable that are calling to us.

And it's our own great grief, calling for attention. And so now, friends, you know, both as a way of closing this talk and we'll be going deeper into this next week, how do we call on our practice? How can we deepen attention, deepen our commitment to pause, and to open to that pain of separation, to open to what's happening within and around us. And the key is to start right where we are, to feel what's right here,

and to respond with compassion. There's one simple practice I did in a workshop with Joanna Macy, and it's to let our attention go to what we're most distressed about, where we are touched, and just to name, let's say, to speak out loud with a partner, several of the most compelling parts of that are for a loan to a loving witness, whisper it, or to journal it again to our high self or to a loving witness. And I've done it both ways. I've done it in pairs with people and I've done it on my own. I remember a year or two ago with another person sharing in this way

and I shared just my great disturbance about the fires that were raging around the planet. Of course, they still are, but Australia was ablaze and Brazil here on our West Coast. And Brazil's fires in 2020 scientists had calculated that 13 million vertebrae died. And we don't always kind of get proximate with that and imagine the terror and the pain of these fellow beings. So I was talking about that. And in Brazil, a third of the largest wetland in the world. You know, it's the lungs of the earth, habitat for humans and non-humans. And just saying it, just bringing that close in really just help my heart feel what I needed to feel.

Even now, just as I say with you, just all those trees, it brings tears. and realness. It helps me feel in a larger space of being just to be in touch with what's real. And my partner, he shared his pain for those in droughts, you know, in Syria, Somalia. You know, today in Somalia, over 2 million people and many are children are starving. They don't have the needed drinking water. It's a drought. I know when he and I were talking about the droughts,

we're imagining our children and our grandchildren, what happens when children are malnourished, susceptibility to disease, the stunted brain development, you know, how horrific. And these are our children. And so we were crying together. It's powerful and deep to share like this.

what it is that touches us, what we care about. To say it out loud or to write it, I've written it and many do this journaling, expressing really the earth crying in our hearts. So we'll explore in a short form right now and I invite you to continue the exploration on your own with journaling and with others. Ticknott-Han says what we most need to do is to feel within us the sounds of the crying. So even right now as you pause, you might sense your intention to open your heart to this living web, to let your heart be broken open, and to take some moments and scan and sense what facet of the suffering of our planet is it that that really touches you right now. You might use the sentence, I am touched by the earth's pain when I attend to and then fill in the blanks or when I reflect on.

I am touched by the earth's pain when I reflect on and just sense. Is it the non-human animals who are struggling, the trees, the humans and droughts, fires or floods or storms? there's so much as you sense what really is the way the earth is crying in your heart. You might imagine the realness of this very close up so that you can just feel in your body what's happening. If it helps, you might breathe in and just intentionally let in this pain, this suffering, but also breathe out and let it move through. and be held in the space of our collective heart.

So you don't breathe in and hold it. You breathe in and let it touch you. Let that crying be felt in your heart. But breathe it out so it also fills the space around you, the great heart of the world. So it can be held in a vast field of tenderness. Just breathing in and out with the pain of our earth. And as you do this, your heart becomes a true.

transformer of sorrows. Srinar Sargadatta writes, when you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life. You will love all naturally and spontaneously. You will know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your heart. Feel free to continue reflecting or if you choose to journal journaling, are just listening. The gift of presence feeling the earth crying inside us is that it enlarges us. We realize a larger belonging. It frees us into loving fully, into being really all that we are. So this is a deep spiritual practice of awakening to feel the earth crying in our hearts, to experience that interbeing.

And next week, we'll deepen our inquiry on really what keeps us so stuck in feeling separate and powerless. And what helps us to widen our identity to align our hearts, to realize interbeing so that we can serve healing as best we can. But for now and through this week, I'd like to invite you friends, you feel on for it to share with one person, some trusted being, what upset you? Like how the earth is crying in you and listen to them and find out more deeply how you're not alone, how we're in this together. And really, we can only facilitate transformation in that togetherness.

So we close in a simple way, if you'd like to close your eyes or lower your gaze, just to take a moment to feel your prayers for our world and to sense our collective prayer that we awaken to our belonging to the truth of interbeing so that we can express love and action so that our lives can be dedicated to the well-being of all lives everywhere. So thank you. Thank you for your attention and your presence. and your willingness to touch into what's true for the sake of our world. And I really look forward to being with you again next week.

Blessings, friends, and namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.