Tara Brach - The True Revolution

Episode Date: July 14, 2010

2007-12-19 - In Buddhism, lovingkindness is considered a divine abode, our true home. This talk explores how we can recognize the mask that covers insecurity, inhabit our essential goodness of Being, and let ourselves touch and be touched by love. This awakening into wholeheartedness is the true revolution. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

I'd like to speak some tonight on what's called a divine abode. And a divine abode means our true home. And in the Buddhist tradition, there's these different qualities of heart and awareness that are really considered home. And the first loving kindness is what I'd like to speak of tonight. And maybe start with a very short story. It's a Sufi story about a man so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of. of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that's really what he wants. So the angels visit

this good man and offer him first the gift of healing by hands, the gift of conversion of souls, and lastly the gift of virtue. He refuses them all. They insist that he choose a gift or they'll choose one for him. Very well, he replies, I ask that I may do a great deal of good without ever knowing it. So here's how the story ends. The angels are perplexed. They take counsel and resolve upon the following plan. Every time the saint's shadow fell behind him, it would have the power to cure disease, soothe pain, and comfort sorrow. As he walked behind him, his shadow made arid paths green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to dried up brooks, fresh color to pale children, and joy to unhappy men and women.

The saints simply went about his daily life, diffusing virtue as the stars diffused light and the flowers sent without ever being aware of it. The people respecting his humility followed him silently, never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon, they even forgot his name and called him the holy shadow. So in a way our reflection is how

when we come home to who we are, that's really what we come home to, that quality of goodness that naturally wants to help and heal, and not because we want to feel good about a self, not because we even need to know what's happening, but because we know we belong and are connected to all beings, and it's just our nature, just to want all beings to be healed, to be free from suffering. We want it because it's the deepest expression of what we are. When we're helping, when we're caring, we're most at home. We're most at home in who we are.

So there's conditional love, and conditional love is where we get a kind of a taste of that loving, a particular experience of somebody else's goodness or beauty wakes up that kind of, Ah, yeah, love. Unconditional love is when we're inhabiting that presence that is love and that whatever arises is touched by it. Whatever arises is included in our heart. So this is what the Buddha called Metta, our loving kindness, this unconditional loving presence.

When the Buddha taught about Meta, he taught about the shadow side, how it is that we don't live at home. and that in a way a lot of the practices we do are first recognizing, okay, how come my heart's closed? First recognizing, oh, my heart's closed. I'm not feeling that flow. And then sensing, well, what are the habits of thinking, of behaving,

of moving through life that in some way create that sense of disconnect where we're not feeling open and free? One way of understanding our predicament, how we end up closing down is that we enter a world that's challenging if you say on a personal family level where our naturalness is not always seen or appreciated and to whatever degree we're not met with that unconditional love

we kind of fragment and turn on ourselves we think we're not lovable and we take on we kind of create this mask and each of us does this We develop a persona or a mask that will try to get the love that we need to get. We try to win the affection, the respect, and the love by being the person we think others want us to be. And it's hard sometimes to tease it out when we're moving through the world, how we're kind of caught in some role or persona that's trying to get appreciated.

how much, how many moments were filtering our experience through what other people will think about us. So we developed this mask. I heard a story some years ago about a little girl who was home with her mom and she was painting and she realized that when you combine yellow and blue,

it makes green and she was completely thrilled and excited. So her mom said, well, when daddy comes home, you can show them. And daddy got home. that night. I'm busy executive on his cell phone. He walks in on his cell phone. He's still on his cell phone as he goes into the study.

And then the kid, he's walking around the house on his cell phone. And Melissa's tugging on his pants saying, Daddy, Daddy, I've got to show you. So he's kind of really trying to close a deal and make something happen. He's taking business home. And finally, he's in his study looking at some charts and she's still tugging. And he's saying, Melissa, what are you doing down there? And she said, Daddy, I live. down here. So when I heard that, I realized there's so many little ways and then so many more

dramatic ways that we get the message that were not important or not worth listening to are just not so cared about. And then we put on whatever we need to put on to try to get those needs met are to protect ourselves from having to feel that rawness. So it all starts with an experience of severed belonging and then we try to get our needs net but in that process we develop these strategies and this mask we get identified with the mask. We get identified with our persona and we forget who we are. And there's no way to have that unconditional love, that full presence, if there's that fear of, oh, they're not going to like me,

or oh, I need to do this to make things work out. We're not living in that fullness of presence. So the first step of waking up to Meta is realizing, well, what are my strategies? You know, is it that we're trying really hard to achieve a lot so that then we can be loved? Or is it we're trying really hard not to make mistakes? And it's a really big deal I've noticed for a lot of us is the fear of making a mistake, of doing something wrong.

It's like it's not just you make a mistake and it doesn't work out. It's like it ties into some deep sense of not okayness. And I've also noticed how so much of what gives us relief and what's fun is stories about mistakes. Have you noticed that? I got sent this a while back. I thought I'd share it with you. some church bulletins, real church bulletins. Our next song is, angels we have heard get high. They are high, you know. Remember in prayer the many who are sick

of our church and community. The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David Allen Meltzer, the sin of Reverend and Mrs. Julius Meltzer. This being Easter Sunday, we'll ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar. The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They can be seen in the church basement Sunday. I'll just read a couple more because they're fun. The church is glad to have with us today as our guest, Minister, the Reverend Shirley Green, who has Mrs. Green with him. After the service, we will request that all remain in the sanctuary for the hanging of the greens. The pastor's on vacation. Massages can be given to the church secretary. I'll just read one more.

At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be, what is hell? Come early and listen to our choir practice. Anyway, it's helpful to realize all the mistakes and missteps and so on because the truth is, every one of us is imperfect. We make missteps. We don't do it okay. And I think one of the great teachings was that Zen Master who said that to be free is to be without anxiety about imperfection, that can we be who we are and really not be anxious about it. So spiritual life,

this freedom of heart is it's not about becoming something different. It's about embracing this humanness what we are with all its imperfections and it's about learning to see behind the mask. If all we did was say, okay, so what's the presentation or strategy this moment and who's really here? Come back to who's really here in this moment. And if we looked at others and said, okay, so there's a mask. We all are presenting something because we all had some experience of severed belonging, every one of us. But if we looked into the eyes of the other and said, who's really here? That would be the true revolution. See, I think of revolution as waking up out of our conditioning.

And our deepest conditioning is to think something's wrong. That's our deepest conditioning. That we get into this clutch and we think something's wrong with what I am or who I am or something's wrong outside. And we believe it and we get caught in it. So the revolution is really to see behind that mask and those beliefs and to widen the circle and see in others really who's there. I was working with a woman some, oh gosh, it was a couple of years ago

who came to me and basically told me about her daughter who has disabilities. She's in her 20s. She was in her 20s at that point, early 20s. And she was living independently, but a lot of learning disabilities and emotional suffering. So the mother basically came to me and said, should I send a lot of white light to her? You know, should I keep sending white light to her?

to her. Well, that do it. And, you know, I thought about it and I said, well, you know, if you like, yeah, send white light to her. But then we started talking and I started saying, so this is how you see her as this daughter with disabilities. You know, she had locked into there's something wrong with my daughter. And we started exploring what would it be if she just meditated each day on who's behind the mask? What if she each day saw who's there? I said, who is there? Who is, who is this being? And she started saying a few things. She said, you know,

well, she's light-filled and she's warm and she's funny and she's incredibly kind. So I said, what if that, instead of sending white light to fix a broken person, right? What if you just sensed

ah, light, warm, great humor, you know, sweet? And she did that for a while, because this is really the most powerful prayer. The most powerful prayer, our gift we offer each other, to see who's there. I heard from her weeks later, and she said, I'm not sure exactly what happened, except for we're closer. That's all she said, we're closer.

And I love that, because that's meta. So here's Sri Narasar Gadata, is an Indian teacher, one of has had a great influence on me 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. Make love of yourself perfect. To genuinely hold this life in our heart, it begins with truly loving what is right here. Now what does it mean to make love of yourself perfect?

It doesn't mean that we completely fall in love with our story of ourselves. Oh, I'm this kind of person. Now that's awesome and I can do this and I'm that way and I'm better. It's not our story of our self that we're making, that we're falling in love with. It's making love of this life that's here perfect, absolutely unconditionally saying yes with tenderness to the life that's here. When we can do this, we begin to move through our world and all the other imperfect human vulnerable beings are included because we've really learned to make love of what's right here perfect. Samuel Taylor Coleridge says, the happiness of life is made up of minute fractions. The little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, our heartfelt compliment.

The true revolution is to see past the mask our own, loving the life that's within us, and moving through the world seeing past the mask of others, seeing the goodness that's there. And we have an innate capacity for it. We have an innate capacity to see goodness and to appreciate goodness. This is some responses that children gave when they were asked, what does love mean? And one said, well, when my grandmother got arthritis,

she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. Another said, when someone loves you, the way they say your name is different, you know that your name is safe in their mouth.

Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared, they won't love you anymore, but then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, love you even more, that's love. When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you. That's my favorite one. So there's a training in loving kindness, and the training is really simple. It's to learn to love this life perfectly by seeing the goodness and opening to what's

here. And it helps sometimes to send a message of care inwardly. And then it's to move. through our world exactly the same way and see who's here and send a message of care. And the message can be a prayer and it can be an action and it can be touch. And I want to end tonight this is speaking part with a story I heard about the power of sending Meta with our touch because it really moved me. And this was Rachel Naomi Remen described. having these workshops and she'd offered them to cancer patients

and she said, you know, when you're a cancer patient, you can feel really vulnerable because people are always trying to help you. So she'd have them get into pairs and they would take turns touching each other and sending love to each other. But then she had some physicians do the same thing at a workshop.

And one doctor described his experience and he was paired with this very intimidating woman, this brilliant surgeon who everybody admired but she kept a distance from others. They get together in this pair, and he's kind of unsure about how to do it, you know, because here she is, she's about to touch him, and he doesn't know how real to get. So here's what he says. He said, I thought I'd play it safe, but after Jane told me about a pain she usually has in her back,

I decided to take a chance, and I told her about my divorce, how hard it's for me to trust women. She asked where I felt this pain, and I couldn't actually say it, so I just touched my heart. She nodded. Then I lay down on the rug and closed my eyes And she sat next to me for a little while Without touching me I remember thinking that she probably was not going to touch me And suddenly I felt like crying

I was so surprised I hadn't cried through the whole thing But I didn't And then Jane put the palm of her hand on my chest I was really astonished by how warm her hand was And how gentle and tenderly she touched me A little at a time the warmth of her hand seemed to penetrate my chest and surround my heart heart. I had a sort of strange experience. For a while there, it seemed to me as if she was holding

my heart in her hand rather than just touching my chest. That's when I felt the strength in her hand, how rock steady she was, and in a funny way I could feel that she was really there, really there for my pain. That's when I started to cry. He turned to her and said, I had no idea who you were. Your patience are lucky, and found she was in tears herself. In a halting voice, she began to talk about how she felt she had lost so much through medical training, her softness, her gentleness, her warmth, about how there was no approval for these things in the masculine world of medicine, and so in an effort to succeed as a physician, she had cut them off. This exercise put her in touch with the pain of this. She had thought these parts of herself have been lost, and it meant a great

deal to her to be seen and valued in this way. It became clear to every physician in the room that Jane was not just talking about herself or even about the other women doctor she was speaking for all physicians who have been trained to deny their wholeness in the mistaken belief that this would enable them to be of service to others. But she was really talking about all of us.

Every one of us in some way gets afraid to really let ourselves touch others. Whether it's physically or emotionally, we forget the power of when we're in our heart sending that love, whether it's through our physical touch, our prayer, or in action. The incredible power of really being in our hearts

and feeling caring and expressing it is something that we know about in our minds, but on a daily level are too shy, are too caught, are too distracted, or too afraid to really do. So the invitation of the solstice, really the invitation of the days when it's getting so little light out, is to remember that inner light that really wants to love without holding back but forgets to try. We forget to try.

Nikki Giovanni says, and if ever I touched a life, I hope that life knows that I know, that touch. was and still is and always will be the true revolution. Let's take a moment to close your eyes. And just gently for this few moments here, the meta towards this heart and life that's here, you might just ask the question, what does it really mean to love this life, to really love this life perfectly?

Just in this moment, what does that mean? Can we forgive and arrive in this moment? in this moment in a way that truly cherishes this life right here. And in that presence, can we sense that edgelessness of heart that really does hold this whole life with tenderness, with care?