Tara Brach - The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2 - Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will become passive or condone injustice) and the practices that create the grounds for surrender, emotional healing, transformational activism and spiritual freedom.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome friends. Tonight is part two of a two-part series called The Path of Spiritual Surrender. And in it we've been exploring the three steps of letting go, these steps that can really alter behaviors that have kept us stuck and free us to live with undefended hearts. So my wishes that this might serve you well. Enjoy. Namaste and welcome.

This class is part two of the path of surrender. We had a skip a week due to me having to surrender to illness as sometimes happens. So I'm deeper in this path of surrender now to share with you all my revelations. I thought I'd start with one of my favorite stories from Kafka. Some of you might remember this. It's really quite lovely that when he was an older man, he used to visit a park regularly, and he'd spend time sitting in a park.

And one day, a little girl was walking by him, and she had tears running down her face, and he asked her to stop and tell him what was wrong. And so she told her that she was missing. Her doll had been lost. And he said he'd help her look around. They looked around together and they tried to find it, but she left and he said he'd keep looking.

He didn't find it. Well, she came back a few days later and Pafka said, well, there's no doll, I couldn't find it, but I did find a note. And this is what it says. And then he read from the note, I've gone off to travel some around the world. Please don't worry about me. I'm fine. So the girl's somewhat relieved,

and she returned to the park every week or so, and each time she returned, Kaffirku would be there with a note telling her about some of the wild and fun and beautiful adventures that this little doll was having around the world. Well, at one point he got much sicker and he went to the park one last time and that last time he brought a doll and he handed it to the little girl and he said that the travels had changed her. Well, some years later when the girl was a young woman, she found she found out. We found and read a little note that had been rolled up and placed in the doll's hand and

here's what it said. You will lose everyone you love but the love will always return in new forms. The love will always return in new forms. So I think the inquiry is what allows us to be available. We all know this world is changing, coming. going, we lose everything and how do we have our hands open so that we can still be available for the love that really does live through this world so we can be available. And the given is that we can't control that this world is changing, that surrender isn't

really giving up, it's accepting that everything changes, that things go. away. That's really kind of the definition. And that as we let go of trying so ardently to control things, if you notice we're continually trying to make things go our way. Just when you're witnessing, just to observe yourself how constant it is, whether it's through our mind or our body, we're trying to manage things so that they work for us. And even a small pause in this controlling opens up the space for this universal light and love to shine through.

So how do we pause the controlling? And by the way, when I say stop controlling, that doesn't mean to get inactive to disengage. Mary Oliver said beautifully in one poem, how to get like fully engaged but when it's time to let go, let go, to really know when we need to stop controlling so mightily. And then what happens is when we have more open hands, there's a lot more wisdom and intelligence and how to make choices that really serve us. So the path of surrender as we're talking about it is not some exotic path that requires major renunciation.

I remember when I've started meditation, it was about 45 plus years ago, it was considered like completely exotic, like it was really considered out there and otherworldly. And I remember one of the first retreats I went to, the story that was shared was of a woman who decided to go to India to see the guru because in those days you want to see the guru in India. And so she calls her travel agent and and her travel agent said, why don't you go to Florida like you usually do? All right, I'll make your reservations. So she goes ahead and makes reservations for that long, long flight around the globe.

And then the woman took the flight, she got on a train, it turns out she met some people that knew the guru and also knew the protocol which was you can only speak three words, but she knew about that. She said, I know, I know. Then she gets on this bus and they have to take this long, hairpin turn kind of bus ride, really kind of tight clenched muscle, you know, scary one. And again, people that were going to the guru's encampment were on the bus and they reminded her, you know, you know about the three-word thing and she said, I know. Finally she's in the encampment in a long line to see the guru

in his tent. And again, she gets to the very front and his escorts let her know the rules and it's finally her turn. She goes in to see him and there he is with his saffron robes and his wispy beard and she looks at him and she says, Sheldon, come home. She was good, she obeyed, three words. We don't have to travel across the globe or necessarily go to three-month retreats although they can be wonderful, into long retreats. But we don't have to do extreme things to be on a very profound spiritual path. where we're learning how to let go when we need to let go.

When we're learning in our bodies how to release some of the clutch of tight muscles that have been armoring us since we were little, and where we learn how to let go of the thoughts that keep on circling through that we know don't help us. We know that they're just telling us things that make us more uptight about. about what's going to go wrong. And we learn to let go in our hearts of what we're resisting. We let go of that armoring so that we can feel vulnerable and discover in that presence of vulnerability that we actually have a very vast, tender heart.

We can learn to surrender in those ways. It takes real training and that's because we have such a very vast, tender heart. such conditioning to clench and control. One of the ways it's often been described is you can see the primitive brain in constant effort to control with the, as they say it, and this was in a conference, I saw a poster describing the four Fs, feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction. We're always managing. All this Huxley had a way of describing it that I thought was really powerful and he calls

it the reducing valve of awareness and that as humans on the planet we get all these strategies and habits of controlling and with those habits that open awareness gets very tight and narrow and fixated. That controlling reduces the field of perception. When we go into a trance the more we're controlling so we don't see the bigger picture. We spend a lot of time chasing after what we think we want, worrying about what we think's going wrong, presenting a self in a way that protects us from bad judgments. We also spend a lot of time even on the spiritual path because it translates to the spiritual

path of trying to control things. In one of the 10,000 stories about the novice who's going to the monastery, and this one the novice asks how long it will take him to be enlightened. And the abbot looks at him and says, well, probably 10 years. And he said, what if I try twice as hard? And the abbot looks at him and says, 20 years. He goes, wait a minute, you told me to him. 10 years.

For you, 30. You know, but you get the idea. You know, we bring our controlling into meditation. We try to judge ourselves into doing it right or doing it different or compare ourselves to others. So the habits of controlling reduce or reducing valve, they cut us off from a lot of the larger kind of creativity and intelligence and love. One woman described her young daughter six years old asking her what she did when she went to the university each day and her mother and the mom said, well I'm in the art department.

I teach people how to draw and paint and the little girl's astonish. She says, you mean they forgot? You know, I think of John O'Donohue who's a little girl who's afton. says, you know, what did we do with our wildness? You know, he calls wildness, really the wildness of God or the creativity of the universe. And what happens is that, of course, the more that in our upbringing there's wounding and there's a sense of threat not belonging, the more tightly we have to try to control to get our needs met.

It's not our fault. But the more we're controlling. the more the civilization binds us and we're cut off from something deeper. So what I'd like to invite you to do is just check it out for yourself because it happens most obviously in relationships. We'll do a brief reflection and what I invite you to do as you take a moment to close your eyes and take a few full breaths and bring yourself right here. See if you can scan today or this last week.

for a situation with another person where you're aware of controlling in some way, where you're aware of either trying hard not to have them judge you or trying to impress or trying to attract or trying to have them change their behavior in some way, having to try to get them to cooperate in some way with you, some way that you were controlling and relating to another person, trying to cover over something, prove something, and let yourself look a little more closely at the situation. Anywhere you have an agenda, you're trying to get the other person to respond in a certain way, when you're trying to control another person, whether it's your child or a friend or somebody at work or whoever it is, in this situation

in particular, how present are you? How open-hearted? How spontaneous are creative? How grateful are you? How attuned were you in this situation to what might have been going on for the other person? And when you're controlling, do you like yourself? What's your experience of yourself? You can continue to look more closely at how we contract, how you contract in particular situations. But more broadly speaking, controlling reconfirms a sense of a limited self, either a threatened self and incomplete self, a deficient self, but there's not a sense of wholeness and presence. And when we're controlling the other person becomes what I've often described as an unreal

other. They're an object to in some way have an impact on. change. So surrendering, letting go of the controlling is a way of opening from that limited small self into true nature, into the creativity and aliveness and heart that's right here. And one of the stories I've heard, a mythological story that I like a lot that describes a bit of this process. It comes from Polynesia. And as the story goes, for eons and eons, the matriarch of the society would regularly go down to the river and shed her skin.

And that was the ritual. But one season in particular, when she did this, her skin got caught in a branch and she just left it there and went back to, went back to, back to the community, but her teenage daughter was horrified by seeing her mother in her new being without the skin and she freaked out, she got really upset and finally her mother tried to calm her down but it didn't work so finally the mother went back down to the river and picked her skin off that branch and put it back on, went back and according to this myth from that point on, humans lost their connection with their own timeless immortality with spirit.

They became confined in a more egoic state. So what's the teaching here? What does it really mean to shed our skin? We might take what Nietzsche said and consider that that a snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. What do we mean? I think of our skin as our outgrown beliefs, those limiting beliefs and habit patterns that we've outgrown but that are keeping us stuck in a smaller sense of who we are. And that as we evolve, we by nature as a way to keep on growing have to let go of the beliefs that I'm deficient, I'm a bad person.

Are the beliefs that you're at fault because you're making me feel bad? Are the habit patterns of maybe overconsuming in a way to numb something so we can't feel our hearts? Over time we start letting go of those layers of skin that keep us small. Does that metaphor resonate for you? And I first heard this myth through the poet Mark Nepo who I think is just a fantastic, wise and deep poet, he describes this process of letting go of what's keeping us small as taking the exquisite risk, the exquisite risk.

And I love this term because exquisite connotes both beauty and excellence and sensitivity and responsiveness, exquisite. And risk, we're exposing ourselves to the unknown, to the unfamiliar, to what's out of control seemingly. And yet each of us, each of you on your path in order to keep becoming who you really are, has to step out of the comfort zone. So this is where we're going to lean in a little more deeply now. Last week, or last class we explored the letting go of skin in terms of three areas that

we meditate, how our meditation actually trains us to let go of skin. Meditation is a process of letting go. And the first way that meditation trains us is that we're practicing to notice thoughts but unhook, not live inside them so much. And this is a powerful and essential part of releasing skin. We have to be able to see, okay, there's that same thought of telling me of what's wrong with me. It's the critical voice of my you know who, whoever we've internalized and here I am believing

it. And the freedom comes when we say, wow, it's just a thought. I don't have to believe it. There's some unhooking. The thoughts you typically think, day after day. day are by and large fear thoughts that reinforce a small limiting sense of self. This is Carlos Cassignata who writes about the shaman Don Juan. He says, you talk to yourself too much.

Now you're not unique in that. Every one of us does it. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as a single soon as they stop talking to themselves. Okay? So this is the first domain of meditation training and letting go of the skin is that we start noticing the thoughts that are keeping us small and we unhook.

One of my friends, Wes Nisker who's a Buddhist teacher on the West Coast, puts it this way when he talks about working with his thoughts. He says, we're still friends and we still live together but I'm no longer codependent. So that's the first step, that's the first training and meditation for letting go. The second one is that we start opening to the vulnerability, the feelings that are here. So we're sitting and we get a wave of emotion and what's the practice? Oh, say yes. And the letting go is our resistance.

We're letting go of our resistance because we are rigged to kind of pull away from what's uncomfortable. So we let go of that and just open to what's here, open to the vulnerability. Now I remember years ago seeing some little cartoon and had a snail at a bar really depressed talking to the bartender saying, well, then I shared my vulnerability with her and And she screamed out and disgust and said, yuck, you're a snail. She saw my innards, you know. And that is the fear.

I mean, that is the fear that we're going to expose ourselves and somebody is going to say yuck because we feel a sense of yuck. When we see our insecurities and our jealousy and our competitiveness and our aggression, all the stuff we all have wired into our nervous. system, we take it really personally and we feel the sense of Yaqa about ourselves. So the challenge and the invitation is to have the courage to stand with and stay with and be with what feels uncomfortable. So this is the second part of the training that we opened the aliveness in our body even

when it feels like burning and squeezing and really uncomfortable and we open to the aliveness of our emotions. The third training in meditation is what I sometimes call remembering love. Now our conditioning is the negativity bias which means instead of remembering love the habit when we're looking at another person or looking at ourselves or our world is to fix on what seems wrong. And that's just our survival conditioning. So it actually takes practice to remember the good, the sense what we love or appreciate about our partner, our parent, or our sibling, or a friend to consciously reflect on that and feel our hearts get tender.

That takes training. Last week I was talking about, not last We keep saying that two weeks ago when we were exploring surrendering, we're talking about how remembering love actually helps us sense our belonging to a larger field and that this is key if we want to learn the art of surrender. Otherwise we'll feel too scared. So we need to feel our belonging and one friend here last, after that class, said that He understood the steps of letting go of fear, he understood the step of opening to feelings, but how do you surrender into a larger belonging?

How do you sense a larger field of whether you call it love or spirit or the sacred? How do you sense that and surrender into and open to that? So that's where we're going to spend the rest of our time is how do we really run How do we really open to a larger belonging, surrender into like the river empties into the ocean? And we can begin with Rumi who has a poem called Ween Yourself that I'd like to read. Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo whose nourishment comes in blood move to an infant drinking milk.

to a child on solid food, to a searcher for wisdom, to a hunter of a more invisible game. Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. You might say, the world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheat fields and mountain passes and orchards and bloom. At night there are millions of galaxies. and in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding. You ask the embryo, why stay cooped up in the dark with eyes closed? Listen to the answer.

There is no other world. I only know what I have experienced. You must be hallucinating. It's good. If we live inside the ordinary, reality we keep telling ourselves about the limiting world, we won't sense there's a larger belonging. When people talk about a sense of the sacred, a sense of a field of tenderness and love and

belonging, we'll say, you must be hallucinating. I haven't felt that. So how do we begin to open to something that we don't feel we've touched very much? And the starting place is to know that you wouldn't be here unless you intuited there was something more than the habitual world that your thoughts tell you about. You have some intuition of what, whether you call it God, our Buddha nature, our consciousness, our sacredness, there's something that draws us to deepening our attention.

We might not know what it is, but when we get quiet, when we're maybe in nature or with somebody we love or maybe we're listening to certain music, we get a glimmer, there is something more. How do we deepen that? This is really what surrenders about. It's letting go of the skin and opening to what's beyond. For some people, I mean, there's many, many different pathways, by the way, to sensing that larger belonging.

We long for it. When we're scared, we want to belong to something and when our hearts are opening, we love the feeling of belonging to something. There are many pathways and for this person who I mentioned who asked me about it, I started asking questions of when he felt some glimmer and for him it was when he's in nature and we got real specific. We talked about his walks at Great Falls Park which is the Maryland side and a Virginia side and it's a beautiful part of the river and how when he paused and sense he could take

in the sound you know, the birds, the river, the wind, the smells, pausing, and he could causing, quieting ourselves a little and taking in nature helps us remember that we belong. This is certainly part of my daily practice to remind me I'm not the small self my mind tells me I am. You know, as I just go down to that same river and listen and smell and look and take in and often you know just sense the currents and that everything that's going on inside me is part part of that changing flow. That's one pathway.

A second pathway to remembering a larger belonging is in the moments that we actually get kind towards ourselves. Self-kindness, even a slight gesture of kindness, even just telling yourself, please be kind, we'll begin to soften and open some space and you'll start sensing you belong to something larger. It dissolves an armoring and actually reveals a larger sense of really being part of things. The more self-aversion you have, the more gradual it's going to be in terms of developing self-kindness.

One friend of mine who's a wonderful teacher and also a scientist really, Shauna Shapiro, describes her path of beginning to find that belonging. She was going through a difficult divorce and she would wake up each morning with a kind of pit of shame in her and her meditation teacher said to her, here's a practice for you, how about every day waking up and saying to yourself, I love you, Shauna, saying to herself, I love you, Shana. And she said, no way, you know, I can't go near to saying that. I don't believe it, I don't feel it, no way.

And then she said, okay, here's a backup. Instead of saying that, how about just putting your hand on your heart and saying, good morning, Shauna, that she could do. So she practiced it regularly for a number of months. She would wake up and put her hand in our heart and say, good morning, Shauna. And it worked out okay. Nothing major, but she could do it. So then her teacher said after some months you're ready for the advance practice.

And the advanced practice was, good morning, I love you, Shauna. Well, the next morning she did and she didn't feel anything but she was able to say the words and that's something. But she kept it up and as this is the truth, whatever you practice gets stronger. Okay, neurons that fire together, wire together, we develop new pathways. Well one morning she put her hand on her heart and she did it and she felt her grandmother's love and her mother's love. felt that belonging we're talking about to love.

But it started small. Good morning, Shauna, just with a statement. The pathway of self-kindness and what I've observed over the years in working with people is an essential part of emotional healing and of discovering a larger belonging because we're rigged to be turned on ourselves and it undoes it. It undoes and stops the war and we stop the war then we find the natural loving and tenderness that's always been there but has been buried. So self-kindness. Another pathway to feeling belonging is to receive it from others and you can do this in real life being in relationships where there really is a loving person,

and you begin to just soften and let it in some, and that can help to build the connection. And you can do it in your meditation practice. You can bring to mind somebody that you feel does care about you and practice just softening and letting it in some. One woman I worked with some years ago had undergone a lot of trauma and she was very, very cut off from herself and others. She longed to feel belonging, but she mostly felt threatened, and she was in a very abusive relationship with her boyfriend,

and so she was in a state of pretty chronic fear. And I had her practice taking in love from the people she felt she could feel love from. And she, when I asked her, she said it was her sister, her best friend and then over some months I got included in the circle and what her meditation was is she would sit and get quiet and she'd imagine the three of us and imagine us just kind of pouring in love and taking it and I'd say what does it feel like and she said it's like being in a warm bath I can absolutely float and let go into the loving. That was her practice floating and letting go into the loving of three people.

And what she found after a while was that gave her enough of a sense of connection that she could begin to be with the traumatic fear that was in her body. But that safety and belonging was the precursor to her healing. For myself, one of my most ongoing practices is, has to do with really setting like I'm letting in the love of the beloved. And I remember when I first had a kind of awakening experience, I went to a retreat and I was feeling very, very turned on myself. I said the more I meditated, the more I sensed that I was really down on myself.

And I tried all my normal strategies of, you know, breathing and quiet. and letting go of the thoughts and trying to offer love to myself. And it didn't budge. There was this core like I was digging in my heels feeling like, no, this is, I am unacceptable, I am bad. And this was years after I had been radical acceptance, so just to say that I was really feeling stuck. And I remember as I got in touch with that really stuck place, it felt like there was

some badness that was inside. And I kind of asked that place, what do you most need? And the words that came out were, please love me. And so I said those words out loud and then I said them again and again and I started weeping because I realized how much I longed to belong to something larger, to be loved by something larger. Which of course don't we all? I mean that's the primordial wanting the great mother of the universe to embrace us.

That was what I was longing for and I was so sincere and right in the thick of that longing and that prayer that I was quite receptive and I just felt this pouring in of tenderness. Like there was just this presence, this vast presence that was right here also that was in some way touching or kissing my brow and just washing me through with love. And the sense was of melting, of just letting go into that. Well, since then, thousands and thousands of times in some way I have kind of called on that presence and in some way, you know, invited and asked for that washing through and sensed that letting go into a larger belonging.

I would say pretty much every day at some point when there's a sense of a kind of contracted small self, some part of me is going kind of like this, where my hands are offering that smallness, that unpleasantness, that judgment, that grimness, whatever, into that larger belonging. I do it so often. In 12-step programs they call turning it over, but in some way just letting my small self belong to something larger, that it happens instantaneously. It's not even a, okay, let me say the words, please love me, okay, now I'm going to imagine

a field of light, okay, now it's washing through, it happens very, very quickly as soon as I sense the contraction in some way there's a letting go into. But it takes practice. I have done it thousands of times. So I thought we'd practice a little right now. kind of letting go into something larger. And as you kind of sit up a little and come into stillness, again, there are many, many ways, many pathways of belonging to something larger. For one man who was in a 12-step program, it was the mantra, it's not my will, but my heart's will.

For another, an executive who was a very over-responsible type, he had the sense that he was taking stuff that he was micromanaging and just handing it over to a larger intelligence, breathing and feeling yourself right here, relaxing with the breath. And you might let yourself bring to mind something that's going on in your life where you're caught in reactivity or you sense that your fears or your anger, your judgment is keeping you small. In other words, you're trapped in a skin that you'd like to outgrow and let go of. It may be that like me you feel like the skin is a deep sense of a part of you that's

just bad or flawed. It might be a belief, a fear, might be an addictive behavior, some way that you're resisting what's going on in your life, something that you're feeling you're trapped in or stuck in, and letting yourself feel the vulnerability of that because we can't hand over what we haven't really contacted. It doesn't work that way. You have to actually feel it. So let go of idea. and just let yourself feel the stuck place, the vulnerable place. Fear, the wound, the hurt, the anger, breathe with it. Sense it as a wave in the ocean and that surrendering is just that in some deep way

you're letting it belong to the ocean, you're handing it over and letting it belong to the ocean. And right now as you sense that, you might have imagine an ocean, a vast intelligence, awareness, love that's larger than this egoic self and just sense that you can in some way offer it into that. You might experiment with what I do or I just as if I'm holding with two hands and slightly bowing my head and just letting it be held by that larger universe offering it up, handing it over. Or you might just energetically sense a letting go into something larger, the river releasing into the ocean, not my will but my heart's well. And just notice the sense

of beingness or presence that's here, that which is witnessing, that which is aware right now. Notice what shifts in your body. Notice your heart. that any expectations, knowing that this is an experiment, it takes many rounds, but that we each, because the truth is we do belong to this universe, to awareness, to love, that the gesture and sense of that, the letting go into that actually facilitates the realization, a surrendering presence. You can continue with your eyes close to just explore in these moments what happens when you surrender thoughts.

Just let go. Surrendering so as Kafka said we can let everything go, we can lose everything and yet love returns, we can experience that, letting go of thoughts. You might sense what wants to let go in your body. right now. Where does your body want to let go? You might sense what you're unwilling to feel and letting go of any armoring, so you just open to what's here.

You might sense in a deep way that gesture of kindness that the awake heart in you is just offering kindness to this whole process. And if you like, you can put your hand on your heart if that feels good. go of any separations, just opening to the love and the presence that's here, letting go into the aliveness that's right here from the venerable Lama Gunden Rimpasheh. Happiness cannot be found through great effort and wellpower, but it is already there in relaxation and letting go. strain yourself, there's nothing to do.

Let everything happen on its own, springing up and falling back without changing anything and all will vanish and reappear without end, waiting to grasp the ungrasurable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you relax this grasping space is there, open, inviting, and comfortable, nothing to do, nothing to force, nothing to want. Everything happens by itself. Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but it's already here in relaxation and letting go.

Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.