Tara Brach - Three Core Capacities in Loving Fully (2018-12-19)

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

Three Core Capacities in Loving Fully (2018-12-19) - This talk looks at three ways of awakening our hearts—seeing goodness, feeling appreciation as a bodily experience, and expressing our care. We are then guided in developing each of these capacities by focusing our attention on someone we care about, with whom we'd like to experience our full potential for loving. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namastea and welcome. And I include in my welcome as always our friends who are with us live streaming. It's such a sweet experience to sense all of us in the field together this way. So this is part of, as you that are here in Bethes and know, part of our solstice gathering. And I'd like to start with a story that's one of my favorite all-time stories. Some of you've been around for a while, we'll remember with me.

And this is a woman who finds that there's this tired old dog that wanders right into her house. I guess she left her doors open. But she could tell from the collar, no tags, but the collar that well, fed belly that somebody own this dog. So the dog falls or through the house down the hall to the living room and jumps up on the couch and falls asleep and takes a nap for an hour. And then it leaves. She opens the door and it leaves. Well, she figured that would be okay, but it happened again and again. Back for several weeks the dog would come by very regularly,

come into the house, jump on the couch, take a nap and then leave. So finally she pinned a note on its color. It said, every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. I don't mind. I just want to make sure it's okay with you. And the next day, the dog arrives with a different note pinned his collar. He lives in a home with three children in it. He's trying to catch up with his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? I think the appeal to me of the story is kind of this open-heartedness with a sense that we're all part of each other's lives, that we understand. and we welcome each other. And I so often think of Mother Teresa's one of her teachings that really the disease and the

poverty of the West, of the more well-off nations, is loneliness, the sense of separation and that that really is our suffering, that sense of separateness. I think of any of us reflect on a time recently when we felt really stuck when we were angry or embarrassed or anxious about something and we check in we'll find that at those times are also feeling very separate from others. They go hand in hand. In fact it was always interesting to me Swami Satchananda who's a yogi described it this way you put up a big sheet of paper and he wrote down the words illness and wellness and wellness and he said, what's the difference, you know?

And then he circled the I for illness and the we for wellness. And it has to do with really our deepest sense of do we go around in this bubble where everything has to do with me? How am I feeling? What do I need? What do I want? What am I afraid of? And go through the day navigating with this eye, I, I, I, are is there more of a sense of who

we are with each other. You might just even reflect for a moment right now, just close your eyes and perhaps remind yourself of a couple of the stressors going on right now in your life, maybe deadlines or difficult people or physical discomforts. And just sense you might even say, you know, I need such and such or I want or I'm afraid that and just fell in the blanks, just experiment a little with the eyeing and mying. You can exaggerate it a little to get a sense of it. And sense what's it like, this sense of eye?

Do you like this eye that's here? And then you might sense we and sense that here you are in a space or in a non-geographical space but in a field with others who are... really in some way have a heart's yearning to wake up, to be present. Sense we for a moment, that there's this shared caring about the world, about waking up. Maybe there's a we that comes to mind in your life, certain people that you're together with and you really sense the mutual caring. It might be with your dog.

But just sense we and notice, well what is it like when there's that sense of a sense of, sense of we, of belonging? How does your body feel, your heart? Noticing the difference between these two identities and as you do you might sense that this is really the trajectory of evolution, this movement from this self-concern or self-absorption or self-centeredness that's tight to the sense of collaborative, collective, caring. You can open your eyes if you'd like. Our world, we're hearing it. So I'd like to explore in this class and we'd like us to reflect together is the three steps that really help us to awaken from I to we because it feels like it's so important.

And I'm going to focus it very much right on our personal lives, right on our closest circle where we can practice. Just to say that the three steps are quite simple and they each arise from presence, the first step in awakening into we is being able to see each other, see who's there. Like really see, beyond the mask. So they're seeing. The second step is feeling, being able to feel that sense of appreciation and collectivity as warmth, as openness in the body, like embodied, feeling it.

the third is expressing. Now in Buddhist psychology when we talk about waking up, it's usually described that there's two processes that are interfacing and one is the process of undoing the conditioning that keeps us contracted and the other process is nurturing the conditioning and the qualities and states of heart that are actually evolutionary for us. So if we start with the first, How do we undo the eyeing and the mying? And if you think about it, the Buddha always talks about in terms of grasping and aversion, that if we look at our lives and we look very closely at what's going on with other people, what is it that's blocking the flow of loving, of we?

It's some form of grasping or pushing away. So if we take the grasping side of it, usually, and I'm in the way, and I'm in the way, we're inviting you to bring to mind somebody that you love but you'd like to love better. You'd love to have your love be more full, more flowing, because that's what we're going to target tonight. Somebody in your life, you already know you love but you want to be more present for that love. So then the question is, you know, what gets in the way? And one of the currents that gets in the way is this current of grasping, we're in

some way I want more attention or more affection or more affirmation or more space. But there's the I wants. I want you to be different, I want me to be different. That's one level of reflection. How is there an agenda of I want that might in some way get in the way of the flow? Wanting someone different. I often think of this. This is a personals, and it says free to a good home, and it's divided into two halves.

On one half, beautiful six-month-old male kitten, orange and caramel, tabby, playful, friendly, very affectionate ideal for family with kids. And on the other side, it says, or, you can have either one, or handsome 32-year-old husband, personable, funny, good job, but doesn't like cats, says he goes or the cat goes. Call Jennifer, come and see both, and decide which you'd like. So, one way that we block love is having an agenda that we want something different. I should be different, you should be different, I want more of this. And then the other is the flip side of that which is judgment, aversion, you should be different. Okay? So again reflecting, let's close your eyes for a moment, bringing to mind somebody that you

care about. that you'd like to be more present and loving with. Notice a recent interaction where there may have been tension or distance. And what was between you an open-hearted presence? And just notice, was there an agenda? I want more attention or more space, more affection. Was there the judging? I want you to be different.

noticing it and noticing it with real kindness because we can't deconstruct or decondition judging by judging it. To bring it into awareness, many of you've heard me talk about that circle with a line going through it and below the line is what we're not aware of. Above the line is what we're aware of. Bring it above the line with kindness. So the blocks to loving, I'm going to keep going a bit and widen out from close people. The blocks to loving, and you can open your eyes if you'd like, they're exacerbated when

we're conditioned in a societal way and a lot of our way we move through life, we're not aware of how much of whatever our preferences are are installed by the greater society. And we have many others that are in some way we are conditioned to see as inferior. So we have all these hierarchies, whether it's class or race or religion or ideology or species. And when we are in any hierarchy, it's like imagine a hose with water flowing through. The hose is twisted. That's what it does. So, when we're in some way wanting somebody to be different, you should be different,

there's a twist in the hose. The twist is a complete knot, so no water gets through when it comes to really condemning others as less than. There's a story that comes to mind a lot for me that I was told by a social activist, Fran Peavy. She talks about being on the Stanford. campus and saw crowded people with video equipment and they were clustered around a pair of chimpanzees and the female was on a leash and the male was not and the male was running loose and it turned out that they were studying them, the scientists were studying them but the

spectators and the scientists and the publicity people there were trying to get them to mate. And the male was really up for it. He was really on. He was eager and grunting and going for it. But the female was on this chain. So he'd grab at her chain and tug and she'd whimper and back away. So Fran describes, you know, watching this and feeling this like real ache and sympathy for this female. Suddenly the female chimp yanked the chain out of the male's grasp. And she's amazed because the female chimp walked through all the spectators to her, who was one of the only two women in the crowd

and takes her hand. And she said, and actually there's two other women in the crowd, and then she joins hands with another woman, and the three of them are there. And she says, I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own support group.

Now, I share this on purpose, because it wasn't that the male scientists and spectators were bad. They were, you know, kind of doing what males do in spectator sports. It was like a sport, you know? And except that their lens was that this was a creature that wasn't as deserving of respect as a human. And that's what happens. It's like it doesn't occur to that.

to us that we're doing it. They didn't think they were doing anything wrong, but we get cut off from love and we do it on all the different levels of hierarchies. We do it with animals when we consider animals as food and turn a blind eye to the agricultural industry that every day torments millions and millions of animals. But we don't think of them as us or as we. So how do we undo the clench that keeps that hose twisted, how do we decondition. And I really feel like we start right with those close in or with those that we're in touch with every day by sensing, how am I judging, how am I grasping?

I'll give you an example, and we'll have a chance to practice a bit, of one man who, His way of creating separation was that he had a really bad temper and he was very, very impatient, harsh and critical. And he alienated others, all his employees and his wife and his team. And so that is where feeling the hose twisted and the distance with his family that came out of his temper drove him to me, which a friend sent a podcast to talk and he thought maybe mindfulness could help. So we explored how when he felt triggered, when his temper got triggered, how he could pause and begin to work with the aversion rather than act out of it. And the basic

two wings, the two wings of awareness are to notice what's happening and regard it with kindness. So when he feels temper going up, he go, okay, angry, angry, pause, notice, it and he'd say, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And then sometimes he'd still say something nasty, but he started to increase the amount of times that he didn't. Does that make sense? Interrupt, you bring these mindfulness and heartfulness, okay? I want to share what he told me after some months. He said he had been practicing and then he met with a project manager who admitted that his team was behind schedule on a major project and that he personally let a few things fall through the cracks.

And this was exactly the kind of thing that would make this guy go ballistic, totally insane. So he felt all this rising in irritation, recognizing it, recognizing it, that's that wing, mindful, he's pausing, he's breathing, he's saying, it's okay, it's okay. And he didn't blow up, and he started looking at the guy a little more closely,

and taking him in and really appreciating his honesty and the sense of commitment that he brought to what he was doing, just how sincere he was. He took his chances. He was just very out front. And so instead of pouncing, he expressed appreciation, which was not his modality. And this guy, this manager, was really caught off guard.

And he said, I didn't plan to say this. And he had tears in his eyes, he said, but my wife has stage four cancer. I have two teens. It's just a really rough time. So thank you. Thank you. And this guy told me that they hugged and it was the first time. He said if it had happened a month earlier he would have unwittingly pounced on the sky.

Instead he was hugging him. And that he, that was like a signal of perhaps the most important change he had ever experienced in his life. And you can imagine that. It's like we can see how, when we start shifting our behaviors we start seeing how many moments we've been doing the same thing over and over, creating that separation, reinforcing eye, cutting ourselves off from we. So this is undoing the clench, looking at whatever the relationship is and saying, what's

between me and open-hearted presence? And sensing, is it because I'm judging? Is it because I'm grasping and expecting? That's part one. The second part is to actively train in the three elements I mentioned that actually wake up our loving, training and seeing, feeling, and expressing. So I want to read you, this is Anthony Demello. He says, it's a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act

of service but an act of contemplation of seeing. When you serve people, you help, support, comfort, and alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner beauty and goodness, you transform and create. When you see them in their inner beauty, you transform and create. When we're contracted into eyeing and mying, you know, the self-centeredness, what we see in others is what I sometimes call their ego mask. We just see their defenses and their personality and so on. But when we say, okay, let me be present, let me notice, who are you?

What's it like being you? And we start really looking, then the light of their beingness shines through. There are a lot of different tricks or ways to pause and look more deeply. I'll sometimes just look at the color of a person's eyes, like if I say to myself, what color eyes are these, that has me look into the eyes and see behind the eyes and I can sense the kind of more of the beingness that's there. There are other ways too that we can practice. Sometimes we can think of somebody and just say, well, what do I really love about them?

Or we can see them when they're happy or see them when they're helping or imagine them as a child, sense their innocence. So many ways. About a year ago, I gave a talk on seeing the goodness and one of the things we did was on Facebook asked people to share what they saw when they saw goodness and others. Like some specific examples, I thought I'd read you a few that people shared with us. One woman says, I saw goodness when my grandmother was alive, she never spoke badly about another person ever. Another, I see goodness in strangers who smile back. And another, I see goodness in my dog when she walks up and drops a frisbee on my lap in the middle of me crying from

loneliness. Just one more. I see goodness in my five-year-old daughter who says to the sun at sunset, Goodbye, I love you, in the pure's voice filled with gratitude. So when we, see the goodness in others, it untworks the hose, it lets our love flow, it's part of what frees us, and it also invites forward that secret beauty in others. One of the stories that most touched me, this has happened some years back, a parent who came to class here actually, they were concerned about their son, he was in his early 20s and he had some learning disability, and was living at home, he just hadn't found his niche. So both parents were very anxious about this,

and the father's talking about having career counseling. And mom is just that, you know, I'm just worried he won't be happy and respect himself if he doesn't find really his space, place, and so on. And of course, their worries and fears were really contagious, and their son was increasingly reluctant to do anything, but this part-time job at Home Depot and hanging out with his high school friends who had never left town. So, they both were practicing becoming more present but they were asking, well, what

can we do? And the mom said, should I surround him with white light? You know, and it's coming up with things. And what I suggested was that every day as part of their meditation, just reflect on his goodness. And I said, well, tell me right now what do you appreciate about him. And of course the mom lit up and he said, oh, he's got mischief in him, he's got a great sense of humor, he's the kindest guy you'll ever meet. She just went on and on. And I watched

her light up just thinking about it and I said, that's it. Reflect on his goodness. And as it happens, feelings are contagious. They bring out what needs to be brought out and he started regaining more of his ease and old playfulness and his confidence grew and then he began volunteering. I can't remember what the area was. It was something to do with video or tech and ended up with a job that he loves and the point being. And I think of this as a parent, just every stage of my son's development, there was something I was worrying about, you know. And I know in seeing him now to the degree that he's got a natural confidence is to the

degree that I, even though I was as anxious and controlling and neurotic as I could be in certain ways, I still saw his brightness and his kindness and his capacity to be an incredible friend. When we see the gold in each other, when we're that mirror we bring it out. So that's part one is seeing. Part two is to feel. And the reason I take time with feel is because... We often will appreciate someone or feel this kind of surge of good feeling. And then our mind, which is a very distracted ADD mentality, will go on to the next thing.

And if we want to cultivate not just a state of appreciation but a trait of moving through the world seeing the goodness, we need to pause and when we appreciate someone actually entrain and let it saturate, our body. Like, what does it feel like to feel that loving appreciation? To be with it, to feel it, and let it get really familiar. And then it becomes spontaneous. Then it becomes something that it comes up with those in our closest circle and with all those we meet. We see the light of spirit shining through. Another short story. This was described by a physician who was seeing an elderly patient and he needed to get out of her office in a hurry. And so she's wondering what the rush is and he says he needs to go to this nursing home

because he has breakfast with his wife. And then she asked about his wife's health and he told her that his wife was a victim of Alzheimer's and she had been there for quite a while. And then he said, well, would she be upset? if you were a little late for breakfast and he goes, oh, well, she doesn't know, she no longer knew who he was, she hadn't recognized him for five years. So there he is, rushing to have breakfast with her and she hadn't recognized him for five years. So the woman, this physician says, and you still go every morning even though she doesn't know who you are. And she says,

he smiled as he patted my hand and said, she doesn't know me, but I still know who she is. This is what we can do for each other. We can remember. And it's not just if somebody has Alzheimer's and they've really in some way lost that knowing. We all forget. Every one of us forgets our goodness. If we remembered all the time, we'd be living in that light all the time. But we forget.

We go around living in a smaller story about who we are. Do you know what I mean by that? A story of a self that's not enough or that needs to do more. We go around in that eye that is very twisted in a way, that the love's not moving through. So it's this practice of really feeling the loving when it comes up and getting to know it that allows it to become really a part of us. So now we've talked about two of the three, seeing and feeling and I want to end with the expressing. So many of us love other people and don't let them know.

We're shy, we're embarrassed, we're self-conscious, it's risky, we don't want to expose ourselves. And yet in the moments of saying, I love you and meaning it, the love itself that's there actually unfolds in a fresh and larger way. So this is a practice and we can do it in our meta meditation and by that I mean when we're sitting inwardly reflecting on people we love we can send our prayers and send our care. We can mentally whisper I love you or whispered out loud and we can do it in daily life.

In my own meditation, I do some form of a loving-kindness practice every day. In some way, I sense the universe blessing and loving me, and then I sense this heart space as infinite. And I bring people to mind and I actually sense that in some way I'm offering that that love is a kind of a kiss or a touch on the brow, like I feel, you know, and then I'm offering the words. And doing that meditation has helped me to say it out loud, more, which is so important.

We can also do it through our touch. This is Ticknodhan. He says, in 1966, a friend took me to the Atlanta airport. When we were saying goodbye, she asked, is it all right to hug a Buddhist monk? And in my country, we're not used to expressing ourselves that way, but I thought, well, I'm a Zen teacher. It should be no problem for me to do that. So I said, why not?

And she hugged me, but I was quite stiff. On the plane, I decided that if I wanted to work with friends in the West, I'd have to learn the culture of the West. So he went and created a hugging meditation. And this is what he writes about it. According to the practice, you have to really hug the person you're holding. You have to make them feel very real in your arms, not just for the sake of appearances, patting them on the back to pretend you're there, but breathing consciously and hugging with all your

body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness and heartfulness. Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms alive. Breathing out is being so precious to me. If you breathe deep like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into that person and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower. Isn't that amazing? We can do that. You might consider that as you move on past this reflection and so on, that if just even a little bit more you in your mind pause and see the goodness and beauty and let yourself feel

the appreciation and express it and now and then that hug. that that hose, the flow of the loving will be so much freer and fuller and more pure. Let's just take a short pause right now. We will. Please bring to mind as we talked about a person that you love and you would like to have more free and flowing loving with that person. Take some moments to, from presence, see that person, see what you love. See that person when they're happy.

See that person perhaps when they're expressing their love to you. See that person in a way that shows their innocence, their humor, their brightness, their goodness. And as you do, and as you let in that goodness, just feel the resonance in your own heart, the warmth, the openness, let it be as full as it is, sensing that you can express your care for this person in whatever way it feels natural you might mentally whisper thank you or I love you or you might imagine kissing that person's brow or embracing them.

You might imagine letting them know their goodness. mirroring it, noticing the quality of we, that togetherness, that mutual belonging that arises through this loving, and close with the, with a short verse from Mark Nippo, poet that I feels really wonderful. My soul tells me, we were all broken from the same nameless heart And every living thing wakes with a piece of that original heart aching its way into blossom. This is why we know each other below our strangeness. Why when we fall we lift each other or when in pain we hold each other. Why when sudden with joy we dance together.

is the many pieces of that great heart loving itself back together. 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.