Tara Brach - Three Practices for Nurturing Wise Hope

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Three Practices for Nurturing Wise Hope - Wise or spiritual hope includes the aspiration to manifest our full potential, individually and collectively, and the trust that this is possible. This talk explores how, especially in stressful times, this hope gets clouded over by fear; and how when it is alive, wise hope energizes and guides all spiritual transformation. We look at three practices - 3 A's - that help us nurture hope: Aspiration for what we love, Attending to what we love, and Actively serving what we love. This talk includes several poems by poet Danna Faulds.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. You might be familiar with those cartoons where they have the one or two people that are stranded on a desert island and it's like about a 10-foot diameter and there's one little palm tree in the middle. So, okay, Christy, my assistant, sent me one of these, and the husband and wife are sitting there and rains pouring down. And he's saying to her, I do hope it clears up for the weekend. And I thought of T.S. Eliot, who wrote, you know, I told my heart to be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. And this week, I'd

like to reflect on hope. And, you know, it feels very relevant to these times in our personal lives and our world. And more than usual, what's compelling me is very much to do with my life right in these times. And I know the power of wise hope. I know how it's a source of energy. I know how inspires me to engage and to serve and to keep waking up. And given the trajectory of much in our world right now, you know, the global crises, how much seems at stake, the U.S. midterms around the corner, I can watch how that wise hope gets clouded over by a kind of grimness and anxiety. and I've heard for many others. I know I'm not alone.

So, friends, it feels like a really important juncture to nurture wise hope. And that means not to ignore the very real and immediate and compelling challenges we face, but also to be able to remember the larger truths, the vision, the possibilities that can guide us. So today, we'll look at what is wise hope, why it's important especially right now, what blocks it, and how we cultivate it. And I invited some Facebook comments on what brings hope, so I'll sprinkle in a few of them. So let's start with some defining of terms and by wise hope.

and I sometimes talk about it as spiritual hope or holy hope, mature hope. It's what matters most to your wise, awake heart. It's what our heart trusts is possible. And that's in contrast to what you might think of as egoic hope or optimism, which is a kind of anticipation that things will go the way the ego wants them to. egoic hope is usually hitched to particular outcomes, say, in our personal life that we'll get that raise or find that perfect mate or we won't get COVID or that the midterms will go a certain way. So egoic hope is natural.

You know, we all have wants and our brain is a predicting machine. So we're always predicting how things will turn out. The challenge with egoic hope is that it can be distorted by grasping or by avoiding reality and it becomes false hope. My favorite optimism story is of a kind of modern-day Buddha who falls out of the window and very high skyscraper and he's falling past the 10th floor and somebody says, hey, are you okay? And this response is, so far, so good. So ego code can be diluted. And actually, it can stop us from facing and dealing with the difficulties right in front of us.

There's a term called hopium, which is more applied to climate. And it's that sense of no worries. technology will find a way to reduce emissions by 45%, you know, by 2030. It's that sense that it'll work out. Others will take care of it. And it prevents us from facing the realness of crisis and actively engaging to address. So a note is that pessimism is just the opposite of egoic hope. It's the ego predicting that I'll never get that raise or find that mate or, you know, we'll never be able to reduce emissions by that percentage and we're doomed.

So pessimism is this habitual prediction that things will go wrong. You know, my father's, he had a joke he would tell us, this is a really long time ago. It was decades ago and you'll sense it. And it was, you know, mom sends her son a telegram and on it it says, start worrying details to follow. So it's just leaning, there's readiness for everything to go south. And just to say that our predicting machine, our brain is very relational. So we're impacted by how others are predicting things.

And we see this with the economy or politics. and it's also in our personal life. If others predict that we're not going to turn out well, that our prospects are dim, that our future doesn't look good, our brain gets into a pattern with that and we get the message. You know, it tells us we're going to other people's predictions tell us whether we'll fail or succeed, flourish or not. I saw a little cartoon hospital admissible.

and it's the emergency room desk and the nurse is handing a new, this very bedraggled looking patient, a tag with a string and she says, please fill this out and attach it to your big toe. Predictions affect us. Okay, so the brains are predicting machine and optimism and pessimism reflect our leanings and they're influenced by grasping and fear. the more the grasping and fear, the less reliable our predicting machine is. Wise hope is not contracted by the egoic wants and fears, and it isn't about a particular outcome

or prediction for the future. There's no sense of certainty. It's more an openness to possibility. If you have wise hope, you have an open to possibility. And the grounds for Wise Hope, whether it's for ourselves or our world, is in what's already here, in the seeds of what's already here. So Wise Hope is really about our potential to manifest all that we are, this potential to keep evolving to awaken the loving awareness that's here and live from it. It has to do with potential. So your trust or hope is in your capacity to awaken. And this wise hope that you can awaken, that you can continue to manifest love, wisdom, it's a necessary vital part of transformation. You know, when I think of the

Buddha, a spiritual figure like the Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus or anything, authentic or true healer, what makes them a force for the good is that they remind us that that awareness or light or love is here now awakening through each of us. That is the value of a spiritual figure. So if you're inspired by someone, it's because in some way they're reminding you of your potential. They're calling forward your best. And more broadly, they're seeing the potential in all of us. And friends, you wouldn't be here right now.

You wouldn't be drawn to some practice of the heart or mindfulness if you didn't have some wise hope, if you didn't have some openness to or trust in your mindfulness, if you didn't have some wise hope, if you didn't have some openness to or trust in possibility, impotential, in the continued unfolding of love and wisdom in yourself in the world. So let's pause here for a moment because it's really helpful to reflect on your own kind of quotient of wise hope and to do so with some curiosity. You can cultivate wise hope. So just be curious, like, how is it for me? Without judgment. And to reflect. you might just take a few breaths, collect your attention, let your attention go inward, and just ask yourself, do I sense that my consciousness is evolving? In other words, do you feel that

you're over time getting to be wiser and kinder, more loving? And do you trust in the possibility of that continuing, a growing, increasing sense of understanding, of kindness of love. Just sense how conscious you're alive is your hope, your spiritual hope, your wise hope, for your own evolution. Just sense that. Do you have some trust in that? Possibility. And then you might reflect more broadly, since over the last thousands of years and then over the last centuries, do you believe that consciousness is evolving in our species? Naturally, there are some periods of regression, but in general, do you sense us as a species moving towards more compassion, more wisdom, and how hopeful are you for the growing expression

of these qualities in our world? How conscious and alive is this hope? Okay, if your eyes are closed, opening them and the next part of this exploration. So why is wise hope so important? And there's been a massive amount of hope research in the last decade. And it's showing its positive effect on academic performance and on workplace outcomes and on happiness and strengthens our immune system, other facets of health. And hope also impacts or behavior. In other words, if you feel hopeful that you can feel better and be stronger and healthier, it's more likely that you'll exercise. And if you feel hopeful that you can feel better, it actually impacts all your lifestyle habits, sleep, meditation, diet, everything will be healthier.

If you have hope that you'll be close to others, that you have this capacity to be close to others, then when you engage, it's more likely to happen. And it goes deeper. I mean, wise hope really is at the heart of the spiritual path. And we need it to start, engage, keep going. The Buddha said, if it were not possible to free the heart from entanglement, I would not teach you to do so, just because it's possible to free the heart, there arise the teachings of the Dharma of liberation offered open-handedly for the welfare of all beings. So I've been teaching now for almost 50 years, meditation, spiritual practices, and what I've witnessed is that the more an individual has trust or hope in the possibility of what can unfold,

the more that person gets engaged and the more it actually happens, that that wise hope, that trust and possibility, actually brings forward what we long for. And this extends to our world, the spiritual leaders who have inspired really transformational movements. And here I speak of the most well-known perhaps of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Dick Nodhan, Joanna Macy. They've all had a revolutionary vision, a sense of possibility of wise hope for our

collective potential. And it's inspired countless people to live towards manifesting that possibility to root their activism in love and compassion. So the more each of us has a vision for our collective potential, for a more loving and just world, the more we energize that very unfolding. Many of you know Martin Luther King made famous the phrase, the arc of the moral universe, bending towards justice. Somebody commented on Facebook, taking a long view gives me hope. I see the arc of time bending towards justice despite all the horrible things and I can see humanity becoming more enlightened. Again, overall, big picture and getting closer to their Buddha nature. Seeing acts of kindness every day, looking out for them as well as doing them, helps on a smaller,

more immediate scale. Again, wise hope does not deny the suffering. It includes some of suffering in something larger, the loving awareness that's intrinsically good. You might listen to this poem from my friend, the poet, Dana Falls. She says, take all the fear in the world and bring it here, throw it in a heap. Now find insecurity and doubt. Locate shame and anger, hatred and depravity, and add them to the pile, find every obstacle to love. If the whole world's suffering can asphyxiate your love, then there's hope for us. Hold your love aloft in the gathering darkness and watch peace spread its white wings wide.

If you can keep your love alive, then war and madness won't have the last word. If you can keep your love alive, then war and madness won't have the last word. then war and madness won't have the last word. Even now the dove is flying. So let's look now at what clouds over wise hope. What cuts us off from trusting in that possibility, trusting that war and madness won't have the last word, that love will prevail.

What cuts us off from trusting in that goodness? and clouds gather in our early life when experience has been difficult when we've encountered abuse, injury, not getting basic needs for safety, understanding, respect and love met. And then they get reinforced by the fears and aggressions of our culture by the violence, the injustice, the oppression. So to varying degrees we're all swimming in these waters. To varying degrees we have mistrust, we have a contracting and a filtering life through our ego-based fears, and it cuts us off. It cuts us off from that hope, our brain, this predicting machine instead gets habituated to some feeling,

this certainty that troubles ahead, that things won't work out. We get cut off. And it's natural. This is part of trying to survive and thrive that so many of us have out of that woundedness and mistrust. We're trying to protect ourselves. But here's the thing. When it's outside of awareness, then it blocks us from remembering our hearts, the source

of our potential, the awareness that's here. It's like being on a trip and let's say we have this unmet need for food. We're really, really hungry. So rather than taking in the beauty of the scenery or learning more about where we are or authentically connecting with our companion or resting in quietness or presence, all we can do is look for signs of restaurants. And that narrow focus prevents us from opening to the deeper possibilities here. For most of us, we spend much of our life hungry and it's often not an actual hunger. It's a substitute. It's a hunger that's going for respect or control or affirmation or safety in a way that our psyche needs it.

And we're missing out and we're forgetting the source of hope. So this leads us to how do we relate to the clouds to the unmet, needs and cultivate and bring forth spiritual hope. And the grounds is presence. Our teaching has always come back to presence to engage with what is. So this is the ground of spiritual hope is to come right back here. Hope does not come from looking ahead into the future. You know, when I look ahead, my initial reaction is often anxiety. You know, it's, I feel like there's so much to do, so many ways of falling short. And of course, when I look ahead in terms of our world, I see the trauma around our globe only growing.

Spiritual hope doesn't come from looking ahead in that way. It comes through the presence that's here when we're reminded in presence of the deep goodness that's possible. And often that presence has to start with the clouds, with what feels bad in different ways. So let me give you an example from my own life of how starting with what was difficult led me to wise hope. And I've mentioned that in these last months I've watched my mind get increasingly stirred up, fixing attention on the growing threats to democracy in the United States and the world,

attack on women's rights and so much more, focusing more recently on the midterms, enough so it's actually been waking me up in the middle of the night. And again, it's natural, anxiety, concern. And I could also see how it was really entrapping me in a kind of grimness and blocking my access to that deeper domain of spiritual hope. Hope was more like an idea, not a lived experience. So a few weeks ago, there were several nights in a row that I would wake up in the middle of the night I could feel my heart pounding and my mind kind of furiously processing all the implications

of what could happen related to the midterms. And one of those nights I got up and I went and meditated and I brought rain to what was going on, to the clouds that were covering over my hope. And it started with fear. The recognize of rain was okay. fears here. And the allow of rain was, this belongs. This is part of life. It's a wave in the ocean. Let it be here. And the eye of rain investigate. I could sense the belief that was there. Oh my gosh, there's just so much suffering that's here and there's going to be more around the corner,

more to come, more to come. And then I felt into my body because, with rain and investigating in rain, you have to come into your body. And there was this like metallic feeling in my chest, a clenching. And I could feel it also in my belly and my throat. And with investigating, it's an intimate attention. So I leaned in, you know, letting it be all that it was. Very large, very intense. This need and want for a more safe, secure, stable world

and a feeling of how unstable it is. So I gave permission to it and I just really opened to the fear, kind of surrendered into it. And what emerged was a real grieving for all of us, for those most vulnerable to climate change, those most impacted by the loss of democracy really, and for all of us, for all species. and then at the center of that grief there was just so much caring about our world, about life. The nurturing was just to hold that sorrow and that caring with tenderness. And I stayed for quite a while with my hand in my heart just feeling like my spiritual heart was holding all the sorrow, all the care.

and after a while all that was there was this very spacious field of tenderness, feeling this ever-changing world in my heart. So I had shifted through the practice of rain, through the mindfulness and compassion of rain, from this ego self riding the ups and mostly downs of the news of the day, very anxious and grim and tight, to this very open, tender space of compassion that included the pains of the world in my heart but wasn't hitched to them. I was resting in a larger space. And in that space was that sense of possibility. I could feel the goodness that is right here in the compassion and tenderness, the goodness

that can manifest right here and know that the same capacity, the same goodness lives in the world. You know, I'm not separate from the world. What goes on through this body, mind can go on through the multitudes. So through the day, it opened me to just remembering how many have been feeling grief and caring for our world, how many have been afraid and under that feeling grief and caring for our world. it opened me to a sense of my spiritual ancestors. Some are blood, some not, who have been dedicated to a more loving world, sensing all those

alive here now, sensing you all, caring, really caring, and future beings caring. So there's this deep kind of belonging to this river of caring that gave me hope. So the path of presence is we start where we are and whether we're starting with anxiety as I was or distractedness or sadness, we start where we are and in that presence we'll discover truly a tenderness and an openness that feels like home, that feels like our basic goodness. And we can sense that's not just inside us, it's everywhere. Dr. Snyder and the psychology of hope says you can get there from here. Here is presence. So presence is the ground of the path. The ground or the source for wise hope. And what I'd like

to go do now are three practices, three particular practices that bring wise hope alive and each are grounded in presence. You might think of them as the three A's aspirin. Asper, for what you love, attending to what you love, and activity toward experiencing what you love. We'll take them one by one. So your aspiration is a sincere embodied longing that you have to love, to serve, to create, to manifest your potential. your deepest heart's longing. Aspiration expresses also as vision. You can imagine potential.

There's a saying that the Hebrew prophets warned that without vision the people perish. So this is a core element of hope, having this aspiration towards the good. By way of an example, a friend I was talking to a year or two ago was really nervous about getting a good. her research published in a top journal. And so we kind of explored that together and I asked her, well, what is so important about this to you? And she said, well, if it gets published, it'll help validate a protocol for treating trauma. And I said, okay, and what makes that important to you? And she said, well, if there's a protocol, then in some way I'm helping people heal their trauma. And I said, so what's matter to you is helping and healing.

That's what you're caring about. And she had slowed down. She said, yeah, because she had trauma herself and just so valued the pathways to healing. She said, yeah. And so I just said, just take a moment and just to feel that. the sincerity of that longing in you to help others heal trauma. It's a beautiful longing. And she opened, she could feel it and I could watch her. You know, she really softened and there was a kind of, she told me she could feel this warmth in her heart area. And what had happened was

she had gotten to a deep aspiration, a deep aspiration towards the good. And it started with being anxious. And so that one pathway, if you want to get down to your deeper aspiration, start with something you're wanting. She wanted to get published in a top journal. And just keep tracing it back and saying, well, what about that matters? And what about that matters? And you'll get down to the deep aspiration that's part of wise hope. Now, you can also find your aspirations simply coming into presence and reflecting and asking what most matters to me. What do I love? You know, is it love itself? Is that what most matters? Is it kindness, integrity, creativity? Barbara Kingsolver writes this. She says, here's what I've decided. The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for.

and the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance, but live right inside it, under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. So this is the root for wise hope, is to just know what matters to us. That's what we're hoping for.

live inside what your heart hopes for. And it helps to feel your aspiration as a prayer. It has that kind of yearning and tenderness. And even to ask yourself, you know, how might it manifest? What would it be like? There's a quote from Jesus, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.

And that's a powerful practice. Sense your aspiration, sense your prayer, and believe you've received it since it's already here and it will be. Let's just explore for a moment. We'll pause here. Invite you to, if you want to take a moment to take a few full breaths, feel the breath in your heart. Invite yourself right here.

breathing, feeling your heart, and just ask yourself, what is my heart most hope for? What's the deep aspiration of my heart? What do I most really want to manifest? If you have a sense of a future self, what is your hope for your future self? Is it to live with more wisdom, more gratitude, love, kindness, creativity? acceptance, peace. It may be several of those. But take a moment just to sense whatever is most resonating right now. What's your aspiration? I often say to myself, well, my aspiration is really to live from love. And I make that a prayer. Please, may I live from love. Whatever yours is feel the prayer, might even mentally whisper the words, please may I, and again, from the most

sincere place in you. And imagine you've received it already, that it's right here. Since as you live inside your aspiration, how it opens you to possibility, it opens you to potential. This is the first practice of nurturing wise hope, aspiration. You might take a few breaths, open your eyes again. The second practice, remember the three A's aspirations, the first, the second is attending to what you love. In other words, intentionally looking for that goodness in yourself and others in the world. As soon as we see goodness anywhere, we become more open and trusting of what's possible.

wise hope grows. And many in Facebook described how this worked for them. One said when my teenager actually apologizes to me in a loving kind way, that's what brings up hope, acknowledging the hurtful behavior and striving to be better next time. Another said, trees, their grandeur and interconnection and communication with each other gives me hope. As does the relative ease my grandchildren have with gender, sexual preference, and race. Among their peer group, it's moving in a hopeful direction. And another, my daughter participates in a youth symphony organization that has four orchestras. Seeing those great kids work so hard, making beautiful music, is truly hope-inspiring.

And another, coming upon something beautiful and life-affirming that's beyond me, A bee intent on flowers, a streetlight in a dark night, the depth of someone's eyes. And one more. It's a small thing, but I love the experience of planting bulbs in the fall as my garden is shutting itself down. The winter is nearing. It's perhaps the most tangible experience of hope I get planting things and trusting even during the cold, gray days of winter. These little bulbs are getting ready to provide.

glorious color, magical sense, our delicious flavor. I read these and they give me hope because I sense how much we are when we pay attention able to touch into goodness. I asked my friend fellow teacher Ruth King what gives her hope and one of the things she said was I cherish a warm smile. And have you noticed, especially with strangers, exchanging smiles. and how you can feel it physically. Hope bubbles up. You feel like, oh, look what's possible connecting in this world. Smile a lot. It's hope-given. Okay, so the second practice is to look for the goodness, look for what we love in the world and pause and savor it. The more you attend to goodness, the more you touch what you love, the more you'll trust its presence,

and its possibility for yourself and our world. Very powerful. Look for the good. Let's pause again. Let's practice this. And as we did before, I invite you to take a few full breaths. Feel the breath, feel the breath, feel your heart, and scan for a recent time that you felt touched by the goodness of love in some way. It might have been love for another person. It could have have been an animal, pet, just seeing their goodness. Might have been a moment of loving connection that was very conscious with another person, a hug, a smile, look in the eye. Might have been love for the natural world, beauty.

Just some moment when you were touched by goodness in another, in the world, and as if it's happening right now, pause, see what you're seeing. If there are words here, what was going on, and feel it, savor it, breathe and take in the intrinsic goodness that's here, because the goodness is in your own being, in others, in nature. Bear witness. Feel it. That loving exists. It's possible. potential. Let your heart know that. It can continue to unfold again from Dana Falls. Where there's love, there's possibility. And where there's possibility, there's energy. And where there's energy, anything at all can happen. And where anything can happen, something good will surely come of it. If at any point,

things seem to be going awry, that's when I begin again with love. If at any point, things seem to be going awry, that's when I begin again with love. You might sense for yourself, there's a place to begin again, to reconnect with basic goodness, to rekindle wise hope. and this same place, this same loving has existed through history. You can imagine all those in the past who like you felt love for life, cared about life, wanted to serve life. All those alive now on earth, all of us, feeling our great concern and our great love,

wanting to be part of the healing, all of those in the future with that same tenderness and care, sense yourself as a flow-through, letting this river of loving care move through you. You belong to these currents of awakening heart, past, present, future, all of us here. Just entrusting yourself to this intrinsic and shared goodness It's the source of our life and the source of hope. Okay, so with your eyes open or if you'd like to continue with your eyes closed, that's fine. We've talked about two practices that nurture wise hope, the first two A's, aspiration and attending to love to goodness.

The third's what brings hope alive, and it's to engage actively on behalf of what's important to your heart. It's the activism. It's to help serve the manifesting of what matters, the love, the beauty, the creativity in your life. And this could be activities that are, that you're doing in your personal life like meditation, yoga, gardening, art, music, plant-based eating, exercise, being in nature, more time with your ones. These all serve hope. They all connect you with goodness. And for many, it's really sensing that we're serving also a wider circle in our larger community, engaging, supporting the organizations and causes that resonate for you, giving your time, money, writing, expressing your truth, for sure voting, in whatever way works for you,

actively engaging on behalf of your aspiration. In Facebook, one person writes, the fact that through social actions and by being myself authentically and compassionately, I can improve my life and create a change. That gives me hope. Knowing I can pursue my goals which go beyond my person and will affect a much wider community gives me hope. There's a power to serving what's larger than this self. I experienced this personally, especially in recent weeks.

During the summer, as I mentioned, there was this growing distress and my good friend and fellow teacher Condamason Pingmey and she and I and another friend, Nisera, got together with some more teachers and meditation yoga teachers and began an initiative for compassion-based activism. Love-based activism. It's called Mind Our Democracy, and it's a nonpartisan platform that's dedicated to democracy right now, getting out the vote for the midterms, but beyond really doing what we can to strengthen democracy, honoring and respecting the value and worth of every member of our society. And getting involved with this, being involved with something larger than myself in an area that I'm concerned with has been really, really helpful.

You know, there's this understanding that activism absorbs anxiety. And of course, anxiety blocks hope. And acting with others, you know, holding hands, doing things together, it helps us remember our belonging and how many other people care gives us hope. and by the way, if you're interested, there's a public event tomorrow night, a Thursday night, on my website. So, and if you're listening past that date to this, you can get the recording. I'll be joined in this event with Valerie Carr, Ruth King, and John Khabitzen, Dan Harris,

and many others. I'm sharing this because there is a real, suffering when we feel we're in our separate bubble and we're anxious and concerned, but we don't feel we're part of something. Be part of the movement for healing. Have that vision. I mean there's a reason so many tear up when they hear John Lennon. You may say, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and then the world will live as one. I can feel it in me when I just say the words. We need a vision. We need that aspiration that I mentioned, the first of the A's. We need to attend to where the possibility is to the

goodness and we need to hold hands and act together. Okay, friends, it's helped me to reflect on this to share with you, to feel you as part of this, your goodness. our world is struggling and our ancestors have struggled in the past, you know, in the 1300s, Black Death killed between 30 and 60% of Europeans. The World War seemed like the end of the world to many people in those times and the Depression. I know so many whose parents and grandparents just felt like they'd never come out. The nuclear threats, we face a lot. We're resilient, intelligent, and our hearts and consciousness can keep evolving. Where there's love, there's possibility. And that doesn't deny that our nervous system naturally

is designed to feel the fear, the grief, the depth of our distress. It's just what matters is to keep coming into presence, keep remembering our deep aspiration, and keep taking the next step. So let's close together. Let's take a moment to feel what's right here, to sense your own heart, feel your breath. Where there's love, there's possibility, and where there's possibility, there's energy, where there's energy, anything at all can happen. And where anything can happen, something good will surely come of it. If at any point, things seem to be going awry, that's when I begin again with love. May we begin again and again in presence with love, opening to possibility

dedicated to growing that love in our world to bringing the healing our world needs blessings friends 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