Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 408: Can You Handle This? | Tara Brach

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

This is the third episode of our Getting Unstuck Series and we’re kicking off the new year with a giant in the meditation world. Tara Brach holds a PhD in clinical psychology and has been practicing and teaching meditation around the world for more than four decades. She is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and the author of numerous books. She’s here today to talk about her newest, which is called Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness, and features illustrations by Vicky Alvarez.Tara’s argument is that we too often get stuck in what she calls a “trance of unworthiness,” spiraling into negativity about who we are and how we are in the world. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that we all have an inherent goodness – what is sometimes called “Buddha nature,” and what she in this book calls “the gold.” In this episode, Tara explains that the boundaries around what we are willing to accept in ourselves mirror the boundaries around our own capacity for happiness, and she offers actionable tools for expanding our ability to accept. She also talks very bravely about how she’s done this work on herself. Join us today for Getting Unstuck – our free 14-day meditation challenge, over on the Ten Percent Happier app. Click here to get started.    Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/tara-brach-408See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. Happy New Year. Generally, around the New Year, the kind of programming you get from the media is pretty ra ra happy clappy, New Year, New Year, and so on. And I say this as a guy who's spent nearly three decades in the belly of the beast as an anchor man.

Today though, we're gonna take a pretty deeply different tack. We're gonna attempt what may be the most baller psychological slash contemplative move available to stare directly at our own ugliness. All of us have things we do not like about ourselves. Rage, sadness, selfishness, sloth, hatred, the odd, shudder, inducing glimpse of our own capacity for prejudice, whatever.

We all have our own bespoke mix. Generally, we handle the difficult aspects of our personalities in one of three habitual ways. We feed them, we flee them, or we numb out. Today, though, we're going to try to do that classic Buddhist thing, the fourth option of trying to look at our demons with some clarity and even some warmth. We're kicking off this new year with a giant in the meditation world. Tara Brock holds a PhD in clinical psychology and has been

practicing and teaching meditation around the world for more than four decades. She's the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and the author of numerous books. She's here today to talk about her newest, which is called Trusting the Gold and Features Illustrations by Vicki Alvarez. Tara's argument is that we too often get stuck in what she calls a trance of unworthiness, spiraling into negativity. The front of my calls, this, the toilet vortex

about who we are and how we are in the world. That's the bad news, but the good news says Tara is that we all have an inherent goodness. What is sometimes called Buddha nature and what she in this book calls the gold hence the title of her new book, Trusting the Gold. I will freely admit something to you now and I also say this,

Tara in the interview, a not too long ago version of me would have had a pretty hard time swallowing the second part of her argument. I've certainly still got some of the incurable skeptic in me. Maybe part of that is my family conditioning. Maybe part of that is just being a journalist. Either way, if you're a skeptic, if you can, as I did, try to suspend any resistance you might be feeling for just a few minutes. You may well find that Tara's advice is actually extremely compelling and very practical.

In this interview, she explains that the boundaries around what we are willing to accept in ourselves mirror the boundaries around our own capacity for happiness, and she offers actionable tools for expanding our ability to accept. She also talks pretty bravely in my opinion about the work she's done on herself in this regard. I should say that we book this interview with Tara for two reasons. One is that, as I said, she's a giant in this field, the sort of person who has earned a permanent spot in our guest rotation. She's always welcome here. The second reason, though, is that we are, as you may know, in the midst of our New Year's series here on the podcast, which this year centers around the theme of getting unstuck.

Our hunch is that Tara's message fits pretty squarely into this theme. Of course, we don't all have the meditation experience of a Tara Brock. So if you are feeling stuck in your own meditation practice, or if you've tried repeatedly to start a practice but have not been successful, We have just the thing for you, our free New Year's Meditation Challenge, which is also called getting unstuck and it launches today. You can find it over on the 10% happier app. If you haven't done one of our meditation challenges before, here's what you should know. Our challenges are among the most popular things we do at 10% happier, and our New Year's

Challenge is the most popular challenge. Here's how this free challenge is going to work. Every day for two weeks, you'll watch a short video and then you will take part in a guided meditation to help you establish or kickstart or deepen your meditation practice. You'll also track your progress so that you can actually do the meditation rather than just thinking about doing it. You could do all of this solo that you can actually do the meditation rather than just thinking about doing it. You can do all of this solo or you can invite your friends and family to join you in the challenge. You can track one another's practice.

You can engage in some mindful trash talking about that. Your home base will be the 10% happier app download the app right now wherever you get your apps to join the Getting Unstuck Challenge for free. Okay, we'll get started with Tara Brock right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelli McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos,

to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast.

What do you mean by trusting the gold? There's different languages for it could be trusting your true nature, your Buddha nature, trusting the goodness, sacredness, beauty that lives through all of life. It has that domain. It has that domain. I don't feel this way now, but I can interpolate back to the me of 15 years ago. It was unpleasant and pretty much every way and also very, very skeptical. That guy would have heard what you just said and said, what does that even mean? What do you say to people who are new to contemplative endeavors or just irretrievably curmudgeonly as I am and find that language

sort of hard to penetrate. Yeah, so typically we are identified. We take who we are to be our personality, our bodies, how we look, how much we succeed or fail and things, and so on. And trusting the goal means to trust a deeper part of our being or a deeper expression of our being. And most of us, no matter how much we're stuck in a kind of down on ourselves or a corner of a small place, at times feel a sense of love and at times feel a sense of wonder and at times feel a sense of tenderness when other people are hurting.

And those qualities, when we feel them, they feel more like home than when we're caught in a smaller place. It doesn't mean we don't get caught like a huge amount of the time, but there's some, I don't know if you'd call it intuitive or just a deep felt sense that ah, this is more of who I am or who I can be. That's the goal. And learning to trust that that's who we are and that's our potential actually brings it forward more. So we may be walking around with a story of, I'm not living up to my friends on Instagram or beyond ashamed for the things I've done in my life

or I've failed at my career or whatever. We're walking around with some story or stories about how deficient we are. And you're saying, well, actually notice the times when you know, often it takes you by surprise when you just see, I don't know, a cat bathing in sunlight or a nice sunset or you do something kind for no reason other than that it just feels good and the impulsive rose uncontrived in you

in the moment, those little glimmers which you might overlook, that's actually really who you are and you should trust that. That's right. And I would say there are two pathways to trust in the goal. And you just named one of them, which is, we have this negativity bias and we fixate on what's wrong. And it's on purpose to look for and remember the goodness. The other pathway is to go ahead and deepen our attention

to the feeling that something's wrong, to where we're ashamed, where we're judgmental, where we're unforgiving. And this takes training, it takes real practice, but stay with those feelings in a real somatic way and bring as much gentleness and presence as we can to them and what happens is in the process of being with a sense of deficiency, we start sensing that there's a little more space and tenderness and awareness that really starts feeling like, oh, so those dimensions of my being are here, they start emerging in the process of being present with what feels wrong.

And I often, there's a story I tell you're familiar with that I'm sure, but just to remind, you are all of the listeners right now. And that is of this clay plaster statue of the Buddha that lasted for centuries was revered. And then in the 1950s, when one monk kind of shined the light in a crack, because there had been a long drought, what shined back was the gleam of gold. And they ended up taking off what turned out to be coverings only.

And it's the largest solid gold statue in Southeast Asia. And what's interesting about this story, and I find it really a help and remembrance, is that the monks believe, and historians confirm this, that the statue was covered over to protect from invading armies, that it might be desecrated or stolen or something, much in the same way that we cover over our innate purity to make

it through a difficult world. And whether it's because our caregivers were not caring, attuned, they were abusive, they were neglectful, are whether it's because we're all in a society that in some way is plagued by addiction, consumerism, messages that are really demeaning for many who are non-dominant groups, whatever the reasoning, we end up having to protect ourselves. And the protection takes the form of what we often will call our ego strategies of being defensive or being aggressive or trying to prove ourselves or hitching ourselves to an inflated special sense of self or even hitching

ourselves to a bad sense of self so that we can try to be the person we want to be, but we have our strategies. And what happens, and here's where the suffering is done, is that we take ourselves to be those coverings, the ego, and we forget the gold. And I'd say a whole lot of the, or one whole way to think of a path of waking up, a spiritual path, a healing path, is that we recognize these are coverings, We learn to hold them with kindness and we remember and reconnect with a much more whole sense of our beingness. There's real freedom in that. So this is the identification you were talking about before that I may notice that I have certain personality traits defensive or I

am I can tend toward the obnoxious. I'm speaking about somebody else here, of course, or whatever personality traits I notice about myself or one notices about oneself. And we feel, as you said before, that that's the whole story. I think you described before, and I think it's maybe worth, as the tech bros say, it might be worth double clicking on that a little bit. The meditative process through which we can kind of disentangle this, where you can sit and in meditation and make these stories,

make the our ancient armor, make our self-loathing, the object of our meditation, and under that kind of mindful gaze, it can fall apart in some way. It won't seem so solid. Am I describing this with any degree of accuracy? Exactly right, and I'll give you an example from my own life. I mean, I talk a lot about the trans- unworthiness, which is identifying with the covering is a sense of deficiency, because I just become a master at paying attention to it, because it felt so strong over the years.

And when my husband, when we got married and he moved down here, when we first got together, I was really athletic and healthy. And within a couple of years, and it was not because he was bad for me. But within a couple of years, and it was not because he was bad for me. Within a couple of years, I did kind of a downward spiral and became unable to do all the fun physical outdoor stuff we used to do. And along with that, became much more irritable, much less patient, more reactive, just less of a nice person to be around. And I remember spiraling into a real trance of unworthiness around it. So not only am I a bad patient, you know, I'm not being a spiritual person. I'm not handling this

sickness well, but I'm also not an appealing partner. And so it was very deeply agitating because it's the whole sense of, is he going to still want to be with me? And I remember bringing the practices we're talking about, which are really mindfulness and self-compassion to that and feeling that sense of unworthiness, which really went down to unlovable, it just felt unlovable, like very unappealing, my own self-aversion projected outward. And I had to feel it in my body, Dan,

I had to feel that twist in my heart, I mean, I kind of know it well, and that kind of empty hollow, achy, sore feeling in my belly. And I just sat with it, I'm actually putting my hands, if you were watching on my heart and my belly and just sat with it.

It really helps to kind of put your hand on your heart. It's kind of a gesture of kindness as you're keeping company with an experience. And I had a feel it in my body because our issues are in our tissues. They are in our body and breathe with it and listen to what it needed, what it needed for me was just a trust I was lovable. And the way that process ended was in some way sending a message to myself to just trust I was lovable, but also kind of asking the universe to love me. I was kind of calling on the universe just to bathe me in some way. And I find whenever I really call out from a sincere place for loving the very sincerity creates a kind of porousness

that lets it in. So I could feel it. I could feel, okay, love is here. And then I was able to talk to Jonathan. And actually without, in any way, blaming him for trying to fix me or do this or that, just say, I'm just really vulnerable and gave him a chance to talk about how vulnerable he had felt, not knowing how to help me. But I first had to go through that inner process of bringing these meditative practices to that sense of shame and unworthyness. So it actually helped me shift from identifying with the coverings a kind of unworthy,

unlovable, unappealing self, those are the coverings of the Golden Buddha, to just remembering that loving, which is essence to our being, and then just having there be room for what didn't feel good. That shift in identity really to me is the essence of all waking up that we move from a sense of a small eye who's generally falling short,

to a sense of wholeness or beingness or belonging that has more of a formless and timeless quality. Can you expand on that? Because I hear that and I find it very compelling having struggled with a small eye for a long time. The idea that we can identify less with the constricted ego and more with, I believe, you called it formless and timeless. I'm asking truly not from a skeptical standpoint, but from like, how do I get some of that standpoint? Well, have you had times where you'll sit with something and feel it and be with it.

And as that's happening, presence increases that the quality of that, which is aware, that which is caring increases. Meaning the part of my mind that is kind of the knowing faculty of consciousness, just not something that I think is me, but just the pure awareness part of my mind. This may sound a little esoteric to folks, but I understand what you're saying. And yes, I have. And that the quality of tenderness also, that there's more just a kindly way of being with, that that kindness is more there, more accessible. Small digression for the first slug of my contemplative career for the first huge part of it, I got a little bit better at seeing, I thought, more clearly, the contents of my

consciousness, whatever was coming up in my mind, often difficult stuff, anger, selfishness, impatience, et cetera, et cetera. But it wasn't until I started taking a deep dive into loving kindness practices that I realized that there was a slight aversive flick in what I, here too far, was calling my mindful awareness of what was happening in my mind. And it wasn't until I sort of cranked the volume on the warmth, really, by doing several long retreats

on this stuff and then making it my daily practice for many years that what I had heard meditation teachers talking about for years, which was that mindfulness as properly understood coerizes with a warmth that the, it's often called loving awareness, which made no sense to me. It was only then that I understood what I think you were talking about now. And it does take time and I'm glad you name that. At the beginning,

sometimes the best we can do is be with the painful feelings and on some level, let them be there. Like just allow that they're there. That begins to open the space. There's an understanding that true acceptance is another way of saying love, like if we totally allow. And what I do often, and this is really helpful, is when I have very unpleasant experiences arising like shame or judgment or anger or fear, if I say to that experience, this belongs. What I mean by that is if my being is an ocean with all sorts of waves, this is a wave in the ocean, it's an honest acknowledgement of this is the reality of the moment. But saying that, it's kind of like making peace with the reality actually opens up some space for things.

And so that's the beginning of mindfulness, is that kind of allowing, not adding instantly saying, this is bad, this is wrong, I want this to go away, I'm going to fix it just letting be this belongs. And when we pause in that way and just say this belongs, there's a space that opens up that in time becomes tender. But as you said, often we need to be purposeful about it because in some ways there's been a real heartening, our armoring, our dissociation from the body and the heart. In one of our, I think our first podcast interview, you won't remember this and there's no need for you to remember it, but in that conversation,

we were talking a little bit about this notion of inherent goodness. And I remember saying something like, you know, I've always had this kind of semi-conscious assumption that I'm actually inherently pretty bad, just you're retrieval-ably selfish or somewhere in the monster zone. And you surprised me, and again, please correct me if I'm remembering this incorrectly. But if I recall, you surprised me and said that actually you sympathized with that, that you had maybe a little bit of that too.

Am I remembering that correctly? That was where I started off. That was the suffering of my 20s that got me going on realizing that I needed to dedicate to loving myself into healing, to trusting the goodness that was here. Because I think that's the core pain that most of us have, Dan. I think that if we are identified as a separate self, and that means that there's somebody in here and somebody else out there, the primal mood of the separate self-osphere, and then the whole circling of having to prove, having to defend the mistrust arises from that, and we don't like the

separate self we're identified with. Even if we're inflated, underneath that is there's something wrong here. So I think that's the transfer bind that most of us are waking up out of, identifying as a separate self that's not a good separate self. This idea of non-separation, even after years of doing meditation retreats and doing this podcast twice a week, this idea of non-separation or some might call it oneness still trips me up because on some level, like I'm sitting here and you're sitting on my computer screen with my wife's in the other room,

I am separate on some level. So can you just remind me what we're talking about when we talk about not being a separate self? What you just described, I think the architecture of our brain is designed to have us perceive separation. You can see it in the way the limbic system works, is that there's a perception of separation, even small, multi-cell creatures know what's in here is me and out there is them and prickle or contract when there's a threat. So it seems to be part of the nature of incarnating is that perception of separation.

And we also seem to have the self-reflexive capacities to be aware of that and to sense connectedness. That's also a part of what we've got and that if there's some description of our evolution of consciousness, it's that we shift from an identity as a separate self to waking up those parts of our brain that actually create an integrated brain and something even more that sees that's not who we are. And that's kind of a conceptual understanding. that sees that's not who we are. And that's kind of a conceptual understanding.

But it's really interesting to me that when I talk about basic goodness, there are many people that say, well, what makes love more basic than hate? Why is goodness more basic than badness? And one of the stories I tell in my new book, Trusting the Gold, I was doing a talk on basic goodness and I quoted Einstein who really asked this question.

He says the most important question we can ask ourselves is if we feel like this universe, this world is inherently friendly, a friendly place. And he said that if we answer that question by saying no, then the result, the impact, is that we'll create more walls, more weapons. That's how we'll use our resources and technology. If instead we have the assumption there's some inherent warmth, friendliness, love, whatever you want to call it, then instead we'll use our resources

and technology to deepen our understanding of this world we're part of. So I gave that talk, because I think that's an interesting inquiry, just a sense of word, how do we land on that? I had my mom, she was living here at the time, and so she would come in and out of my classes with me, and when we'd be driving home, we'd talk about the topic. And she was a philosophy major. She was a barnard. She really loved talking about things. And she would challenge me if she had the slightest open egg. She loved it. So she took it on. She said, what makes goodness more more real than badness? You know, she talked about the destruction of the climate and racism and she was real advocate against capital punishment.

And then she said, I'll settle for neutral at best. And we continue to talk. And by the way, she would challenge me even when she agreed with the sentiments, you know, just for fun. And I shared with her that there's no way we can know cognitively. It's more, is a certain way of viewing the world, and this is really pragmatic. How does it serve? And that for me, sensing as primordial or a priori, as the realness of of what we are as goodness, as love, as awareness

actually leads me to experiencing more love in my day, to being less defensive, to being more open. And so it's just useful. In fact, if I have a mantra in recent years, it has been trust the goal, you know, trust in that. So that when I'm kind of hooked on that, the negativity bias and seeing the coverings, I'll just remember. And it feels very embodied now. So even though it seems like a choice, it feels like a precious guide for me. Anyway, she could relate to that. And interestingly, she died several years later.

Her way was to see the best in people and bring it out of them. She was on board. She just didn't buy the argument being in a cognitive way stated so firmly what she was right about. When you say trust the gold, is there an element of yes, I trust in that.

I want to get on the right side of the self-fulfilling prophecy here of trusting the gold and me and in other people. But, you know, delusion is still real. In the universe, hatred is still real out there. And you probably should lock your front door, depending on where you live, you probably should lock your car, depending on where you park, etc. I had a supervisor right when I was going for my psychology license, who was an extraordinary psychologist, and his talent was he would be with people, and he was really a mirror of goodness. He helped them trust that there was a basic goodness in them.

help them trust that there was a basic goodness in them. And because there was such a feeling of safety in his gaze, he could explore with them the patternings of the covering, their defenses and aggressions, and he was so lucid, so skilled at doing that. But he really was able to help people just rest in some fundamental trust. And so we don't ignore the coverings. In fact, there's some people we don't go near. There's some people we'd want in jail. There's some people we wouldn't vote for. Whatever it is, we

don't ignore them. But it serves so much to remember that no matter who or what we're bringing to mind. There's an essential life force, awareness, value that's living through them. You mentioned your book. I want to talk about that. There's some sections of the book that I think would be fascinating to discuss. One of them has to do with the second arrow. That's a term we've used here on the show before,

but it might be new to some people. Can you talk about that? Yeah, this comes from some of the Buddhist texts We've used here on the show before, but it might be new to some people. Can you talk about that? Yeah. This comes from some of the Buddhist texts where the Buddha said, if you get struck with an arrow, it hurts. Well, an arrow is when fear arises or anger arises or shame arises. When those emotions spontaneously arise, it hurts. And the second arrow is that we judge and make ourselves wrong for what's happening.

So I might feel, let's say, if I feel insecure during this conversation, then the second arrow would be, and what a jerk I am, that's so embarrassing that here I've done so many conversations like this. I would add on some negative self attribution. So that's kind of a slant of it that I find most people find valuable. But they talk about second arrowing themselves and something will happen and then they'll add on, I'm bad, I'm wrong. I shouldn't be like this.

Just checking, you're not feeling insecure that that was a hypothetical, you were positing, or are you? Not insecure. There's a background monitoring of, are we exploring what will most serve, and it feels really good, but I always am monitoring for that. So there's some agenda, but not insecurity. If we stray from the agenda, I hope you'll say. I'm not sure that's really possible. I think that may be part of my just temperament. Like, got it. Let's make sure it's good. I can assure you from my perspective, it's all good. like, got it. Let's make sure it's good. I can assure you from my perspective, it's all good. Yay! Well, that's a really great frame to hold. Much more of my conversation with Tara Brock right after this. Hey, I'm Arisha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the

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By the way, most of trusting the gold are stories from my own life of kind of where I've been stuck and what I've been learning. And in this one, because so much of my steepest learning curves, I would say, Dan, are around waking up to how this racial caste system in our society has conditioned this body and mind with biases and sense of privilege and entitlement that I just hadn't seen. And it's become really clear to me that there's no real freedom if I don't see those layers of conditioning.

Like that's as much a part of the spiritual path as anything else is waking up to white supremacy and how it lifts through this body and mind and really the suffering created by white people over the centuries, and being accountable. So, with that as a background, I did a year-long white awareness training, and then I did a three-year group with a mixed group of people, both mixed race, but also in terms of gender identity and sexual orientation. It was a real mix of 12 of us. And the intention of the group was,

let's find out what's it like being you. It was a really beautiful inquiry. What's it like being you in your group identity and who you are in all those levels? And the first six months, I was really in bad shape in the sense of really self-conscious, really unnatural, very tight, unable to really be at all engaged. And I basically didn't feel like I belonged, which is, you know, here I was, the white person, not feeling belonging.

And so I started to investigate that after one particular of our gatherings, it was really painful. And what it came down to as I brought mindfulness and compassion to what was going on inside me was that the experience of belonging to a dominant culture group that had caused this much pain and the sharing's, oh my gosh, just a sense daily, the kind of pain my friends lived with, the kind of violations. It was just just thinking about it, very heartbreaking. But what happened was I was feeling responsible, I was feeling guilty, I was feeling like I could never do enough to make amends to repair. And so I went into this kind of guilt spiral, and that's what was locking me up. And as I paid attention to that guilt, and I

really went inside it, I just felt like how it separated me from the group and I just felt this longing to be unhooked, to be feeling our connection. And with that I felt like, okay, let's open to the realness of the pain that others are experiencing. And I just really opened a lot to the hugeness of the suffering of these generations and that are that's active right now in our culture, very much active, in fact, if anything white supremacists inflamed right now. And so in opening to that, it just brought on a lot of grief, but it was very pure grieving. And that really made a difference to go from guilt to heartbreak, really made a difference

because I found then I was with others and I was just tender and open. I also found that it gave me a bigger perspective that the horror of what white people have done as a group doesn't make me a bad person. It just lets me know that this is truly suffering and I need to be part of the response. So it actually helped me to engage and deepen my commitment to being part of repairing, but realizing that the guilt, the owning it as an individual badness actually got in the way. And I shared it in the book, Dan, because it seems pervasive among white people that either we feel guilty or were in denial or were angry that this is being brought up, but in some way, it's called fragility, we're fragile. And it hasn't healed my fragility.

I am still in the last couple of weeks have been in mixed groups that have some sensitive issues and feeling this fear of making a misstep and the self-consciousness. But it doesn't spiral in and grab my identity in the same way, because I know now the pathway to going to where the suffering is and grieving it. And I grieve a lot. I think white people in order to be part of the healing have to be uncomfortable and have to grieve.

I think it's so helpful and normalizing to hear you as such an accomplished meditation teacher and somebody who has so much training in the psychology world as well to be so open about your own personal struggles about this subject and all the other subjects we've discussed coming up to this. It's really helpful because it really just gives us all permission to be messed up. Two, and to know that there is a way out. Just to restate, I think your central thesis on this subject is that guilt, especially among white people, us white people, just burrows us further into ourselves, whereas a heartbreak or just an openness to the amount of damage that's been done by our forebears and that is still with us now with so many negative consequences.

While it's uncomfortable and painful, letting all of that in, we'll position you to engage constructively and be part of the solution as opposed to residing in anger and denial. And unconsciously perpetuating our role in the problem. Yeah. There's another piece to it that is just as important that the grieving is not just for those who have been the victims of white violence. It's also for us white people because I can speak personally, living in that conditioning of other, even though it's been very unconscious, it still surprises me how it keeps reappearing and more subtle, but very real versions. Living in that separates me, and it makes it so I can't feel the belonging to so many people.

And that's harm. And that hurts. It's so delicious and so freeing to feel a part of it all and it fragments the world. So we lose out by the conditioning too. It's another level of suffering, but we lose out. They argue that goes,

we have to armor up in order to ignore the inequality all around us. And that's not only bad for people who are on the wrong side of the inequality equation, but also bad for us because that armor stops us from being, you know, fully right here. That's exactly right. The armor Armors are hearts so that we can't really be at home in ourselves and we really can't be intimate with our world. Yeah somewhat related subject. They also bring up in the book is something you call newspaper meditation What is that? Yeah, and I'll have to update it a little to podcast and on the web. But yeah, so where it came from was,

I was publishing radical acceptance in 2003. So I'd written radical acceptance. I was going around giving talks on radical acceptance. And so many people said to me, Vatara, are we gonna radically accept that our earth is suffering or we're gonna radically accept the class inequalities? That kind of question. And we were on the verge of attacking Iraq. And my basic response was,

no, we're accepting what's coming up is in the moment so that we can respond intelligently to our world. That was my response. But meanwhile, I was struggling with it because I would be reading the newspaper every day and read about how white males in power were planning to attack Iraq and get this sense. It's for boating of the ripple that was going to occur and how many humans and the landscape were going to suffer and how it was going to spread and spread. And so on. And I was so angry, Dan. I mean, I was just every time I'd read in the newspaper,

I was tied up in knots and really angry, mostly focusing on those who were in power that were making those decisions. And so I realized that was not serving. And so I started practicing, putting down the newspaper, pausing, and feeling the anger, and opening to it. Just the way we've talked about with some of the other feelings where I'd bring my attention to where the anger was, this kind of explosive, swelling experience in my chest and breathe with it. And if I let it be as big as it was, I'd find underneath it there was fear. So then I'd be with the fear in that same way, just really opening to it, inviting it

to be there. This belongs, feel it, breathe with it. And if I really open to it, underneath that, there was grieving for loss, for all the loss. And if I kept opening to the grieving, I'd find really right at the center, just caring that I care. And if I could get down to the caring, then whatever words or actions would come out of that, I knew would be much more for the healing of the world than if I was acting out of the anger. And as it turns out, soon after I started this newspaper meditation, the whole number of us

were demonstrating on the Capitol, and a bunch of us got arrested. There were a lot of clergy that got arrested as part of it. And I remember the police going, oh, white collar crime, you know, which it was really cute. And there wasn't hostility there. But what really struck me about our protest was we weren't clenching our fists and it wasn't like hateful and angry. It was kind of prayerful that the world keep their eyes on protecting life, on cherishing life, and a real different feeling. And there's a very powerful quote from the Buddhist teachings that hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed that this is the ancient and eternal way.

And it feels so true that we hear the news, it inflames us. And if we then don't process the anger and the fear that's under it, we end up acting in ways that actually perpetuate the very suffering we're upset about. You mentioned prayer. And in the book, you talk about your relationship to prayer. A lot of Westerners are drawn to meditation, secular meditation, or even Buddhist meditation, because maybe they had a bad experience in the religion of their upbringing, and Buddhism is not a religion in the Abrahamic sense in that there's a creator God, et cetera, et

cetera. So there are in some precinct size, I would imagine, of this audience, some people who are, you know, not huge fans of prayer or, some people who are, you know, not huge fans of prayer or the word prayer. What do you mean by prayer? Yeah, it's a good question because there are different interpretations. I grew up unitarian,

I remember unitarians used to say joke that prayer was addressed to whom it may concern. Right. Which I always liked. For so, it's very deep in Buddhism in almost every place that it cropped up prayer, but not maybe in the sense of I, a small self-tara, and praying to the Almighty out there. It's not that. I think what we're reaching out towards is really truth, the truth of

a larger reality that we have temporarily forgotten, that prayers the longing to remember and connect with and experience that. And in a deep way, down the way, I think of it is that awareness is waking us up and it calls us home through the quality of longing. And even those who are most maybe cynical about the idea of prayer, have some longing or aspiration, some passion that's motivating them and energizing the path. So whatever we call it, there's something that we want or long for, we wouldn't commit to practicing every day or commit to doing a podcast like 10% if there wasn't some longing in there to wake up, to realize something, to come home, whatever words we want to put on it. I think it's really valuable to let that be conscious. To, in Buddhism and the Bodhisattva tradition, it's described as aspiration, and it's just a part of the practice,

to realize what most matters to you. What do you really care about? And what would your life be like if you remembered that war moments? If you, in the midst of a day pause and said, okay, right now what really matters? And then we're getting in touch with the sense of prayer. And when we earn a stock place underneath the pain is some unmet need, something we're really longing for. I love the way John O'Donohue, the poet put it, prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. It actually carries us.

Would you say that the Buddhist meditation practice of loving kindness, we close our eyes and counter the image of somebody, animal or human and repeat phrases like may you be happy, may you be safe, et cetera. Would that be prayer in your view? It has two different functions. One is it's in a way a concentrating, collecting, settling practice because it quiets the random busyness that's usually fear-driven of our mind, and so it actually quiets the mind and gathers us. And yeah, the second one is it's a prayer to the extent that we feel care when we offer it, we're arousing the heart. And as soon as the hearts aroused, there's the separations dissolve. And a lot of people will say, well, you know, if you're a Buddhist

and you're saying, may you be happy, Isn't that a sense of a self and another? And there's not supposed to be a self. But in Buddhism, there are tons of practices, they're called skilful means that create an atmosphere for resting in ultimate reality, just being the living awareness itself. And Metta is one of them where in any moment, I look at you and I really feel that sense of, Dan, I really want you to be happy.

And I feel it. In those moments, there's actually less separation. So they work. To just jump on the phrase, their ultimate reality for folks who are new to Buddhism, Buddhist talk about relative reality, which are conventional reality, which is the world in which we mostly exist. I, Dan Harris, had this calendar, a woman show up today to interview you to our Brock.

And so I'm relating to you as a separate person. But the ultimate reality is just as this chair I'm sitting in is solid on a relative level. Ultimately, it's mostly empty space populated by spinning subatomic particles. On an ultimate level, there is no homunculus of Dan Harris between my ears. It's just this body and mind is a coming together

of conditions, just like an atmospheric arising like a storm. And so in the Buddhist tradition, we talk about relative practices like meta or loving kindness, and then ultimate practices that help you penetrate through the illusion of the self. That was a really clear explanation. And I often think of it like just the way the coverings of the golden Buddha, like we need the strategies that our survival brain has to keep us alive and functioning and that our ego has to be productive and do things. And those

are the different waves that are happening and some are more useful than others. But there's also can be a remembrance of the ocean or the gold, which is really a presence that's always here that has a more timeless and formless quality, and that's what's described as the ultimate. And the possibility on the path is that they don't have to be so separate. We can be in some way resting in that ultimate. Like I can look at you and sense that's the same sentience that's supposedly in this body mind looking out and that same awareness, listening, if I pay attention to that, there's a bit of the edges that dissolve of a separateness and there's a field. You can kind of feel a field

that everything's arising from and coming back into. And if we got really still in that, this is more of a relational practice of touching into the ultimate. But if I just keep sensing that what's looking out, that there's a tenderness there, that there's an awakefulness there, is the same as here. That field becomes more predominant, and there's not so much of an identification with all the historical and personal. Does that resonate for you? Yeah. Yes. I mean, I feel like my understanding is at a junior varsity level at best, but yeah, I do get the sense that both of us are animated by some sort of life force that is for all the scientific developments of the last couple of centuries.

Still a mystery, consciousness is still a mystery, and whatever this is that's turned the lights on inside of me is the same for you. And so we can look at that. Exactly. That's part of what deepens my sense in basic goodness is because when I get quiet and I calm down and I'm not caught in ideas and so on, There is a presence that arises and that's always been here, but becomes more apparent, that has a fundamental capacity to respond with care to the world. It just, that's when I'm not in a contracted state. So there's love here.

And that, as I mentioned earlier, that feels more true, more basic than anything else. And if there's love here, I can assume it's in you and I can assume it's everywhere because we're all made of the same stardust, you know? It's like whatever aroused this universe, whatever I think of it as awareness came into form all these multiple forms. It's the same, you know, that's living through us. So I assume that if I trust the goodness that's in me, that naturally extends to trusting the goodness in life. Much more of my conversation with Tara Brock right after this.

Use the word there that, as you will know since we discussed this a little bit before we started rolling, I've been working out a book that I've been sort of temporarily describing as being about love. You use the word love. And if I heard you correctly, which I may not have, you use a pretty sort of capacious, broad definition of the word. Often, it's a confusing word in the West because we use it to apply to romantic love

and how we feel about chocolate and how we feel about our children. And there's been all of this science around different flavors of the human capacity to care, which from civility to compassion, to empathy, both cognitive and emotional empathy, to self-compassion and the scientists, and even sometimes the Buddhist really slice this up into pretty fine categories.

And I've come to think of it all, as I said before, all of the, anything that falls under, even ethics, anything that falls under the human capacity to care. And this is, by the way, an omnidirectional force, right? It's directed at ourselves as well as at other people. All of this, I think, can fall under the broad and often controversial eges of love. Is, am I interpreting you incorrectly, based on the foregoing utterance?

No, actually, I'm right there with you. And I think it's important. And I'll say why? I do right there with you. And I think it's important, and I'll say why. I do think there are flavors of love that sometimes it comes out as compassion where you're paying attention to suffering, and there's that tenderness and wish for somebody to feel better. And sometimes it comes out as joy because you're just feeling, you're celebrating something. And sometimes it's gratitude.

So there are flavors, but I agree that it's of one nature. And my understanding would be that just the way our mind, our wisdom mind can perceive connectedness or non-separation, the felt sense of the heart is love when that comes. And I love the race, Srinar Sargadato, one of my favorite of the meditation teachers, mystical teachers from India, no longer alive. He says, wisdom tells me I'm nothing.

Love tells me I'm everything. And between the two my life flows. And so the mind can see that there's no separate self in here. But the heart's experience is that means what we are belongs to everything. So any practice that softens the armoring of the heart that's trying to hold on so much to the separateness at a fear will start opening us to that experience of non-separation that the heart has to be embodied. The reason that most people have a hard time and so many people report this to me feeling bad about themselves that they're not really a loving person is because the

trauma is in fears of this life appropriately. their coping strategy was dissociation, and it takes coming back into the body and feeling what's difficult to also feel that very delicious, refined sense of tenderness and love. On the subject of feeling what's difficult, there's a quote in your new book. I'm going to read it to you and maybe you can expand on it after I stop talking. Here's the quote. The boundary to what I can accept is the boundary to my freedom. Yeah. So in this comes back to what we were talking about earlier when you said it, you thought you were being mindful, but it took years for you to sense the two wings, that it's both mindful, seeing what's happening, but also a profound kind of tender, including the wing of care. And acceptance, when it goes really deep, is

love, because if, when there's no resistance to what's here, that sense of separateness falls away. That what gives us a sense of a separate self is the ways that we resist and grasp around experience. So in any moment where we really, there's a surrendering into what's here, and opening into what's here, the pure acceptance, there will be the realization of, oh, nothing

separate, and the heart will sense, ah, love. But that takes practice because we're so habituated to defending and resisting that it's kind of a gradual softening. One of my favorite phrases, by the way, is just to keep meeting our edge and softening, as well as we can. It has its own pace because again, with trauma, if we try to hard to soften, we can get retraumatized. So we have to really do it compassionately, gradually. And are you referring to in our meditation practice

when tough stuff comes up or just how we might handle this in day to day living or on the couch with our therapist or both. All of it, yeah. When there's trauma and there's been dissociation, the pathway is to gradually re-enter and feel the pain, the hurt, the wounds, the betrayals in the body. And yet, we need to do that carefully because if we go into fast, all we'll do is re-experience in the pain without any of the resources we need to reframe it and digest it and heal

it. So there's something that a lot of us call resourcing, which is we have to do a certain amount of just creating safety and creating a sense of us call resourcing, which is we have to do a certain amount of just creating safety and creating a sense of some connectionists wherever we can find it and actually build the neuropathways related to safety and connection enough so that there's space enough, resilience enough to touch into what's difficult. You've done so much great teaching in this brief discussion. And so perhaps it might make sense to close on something very interesting you talk about in your book.

And you've hinted at it a little bit in this discussion so far, is that you've had some struggles with your persona as a teacher. What has that been like and in what form have those struggles come? Well, they go in two very distinctive directions, and one of the directions is the fear of failure, the sense that, oh, I'm not gonna show up well, I'm gonna let people down, I won't be prepared. I've been working with fear of failure

and the sense of deficiency for many decades now. The thoughts and feelings can arise, but they don't grab my identity. I mean, I've just worked with them so much as I see them. They're not comfortable, but I know something a deeper truth, so they don't hook me. The other direction that I can go, that also doesn't hook me, but it's very uncomfortable, is inflation. And there was a phase that this was like, this was the thing I was working on. I think it was the second book came out. And I just was at another level of people knowing of me and so on. In some way, and it's kind of interactive with the world,

I started sensing that I knew something that others didn't know or knew more. I just had some importance and some specialness. I didn't want to feel that. Honestly, Dan, I mean, it's like that was more embarrassing than feeling ashamed. And it was really hard to name it out loud, because it was real.

And I was feeling it. And even now I'm slightly uncomfortable naming it, but I've done it a lot. So I started working with special person, which is, you know, a part of the covering of the Golden Buddha. You know, there's the deficient failing self, and there's the special person self. You know, I'd come back from a workshop or something, and, you know, where I had been I'd come back from a workshop or something and you know where I had been with people and realized, wow, I was a little bit separate. I was kind of assuming a role and really feel tremendous pangs of regret. So I tried to get rid of special person. I really did and I threw out it every, every trick I knew. I reined on it it which is the meditation that's weaving mindfulness and compassion and I forgave it and I just did I really tried

everything and I remember one night I was meditating and I was feeling a lot of spaciousness and openness and connectedness and all of a sudden some thought about something I was going to do in a week and then a wondering, wow, I wonder how many people have signed up for that. I betcha that one's really, I betcha there's a lot of people that are coming in. And I just like went, no, you know, it was so frustrating.

I don't know if I said it out loud, but it was the sense of what else can I do? And then some wisdom, I don't know if it's actually a voice or what you want to college, I just said, and just let go, just surrender. It's okay. And something dropped away. It was like, okay, I can't fight. A self can't get rid of a part of a self. And just let him go the struggle. And space opened opened up and that very clear knowing that the currents a special person could come and go and it was really okay It's just like it's just no worse or better than anything else and that I could rest in something larger

So there was a feeling of freedom and non-identification and then a part of me went, wow, I think I got this special person thing nailed. Oh my gosh. And of course, that was more claiming of fame for special person. But I could see it with a kind of bemusement and again, not be hooked.

So this part of the covering comes and goes as does feelings of fear of failure, but it's okay. And I think that's the deal that we sense a fundamental all-rightness, that we know who we are beyond the coverings. And that way we can be in a wise and caring relationship with what comes up and with other people. And this is really, I think, part of the gift of the whole path is we can see past the mask of their defenses and reactivities to who's there.

And it helps us to bring out the goodness and others and to not be so caught in reactivity to where they're having trouble. I love when you tell stories where you're kind of opening up about your own inner struggles. It's just very helpful to the rest of us. I lied when I said that was my last question. The one last truly last thing I do want to ask you about is your argument, which I have to share, or I have to agree with, that we might consider taking the gold all the way to our dinner plate. Can I get you to talk about that a little bit? What I'll do is back up a little and share a version of loving kindness that I do regularly

and the way it arose was I was out hiking as I often do on the Potomac. And when I do, I kind of commune with the wildlife there, and in the spring, the baby ducklings and the baby gozzlings. And I watched them through the year, so I'm really connected and involved with the different creatures. And during one particular walk, it was late fall around now. There were shots that rang out, and were up, murderer shooting geese. And I was stunned by it. And then I'm just horrified. Because I just had this vision. I mean, I've watched their pairs go around. One of them loses their mate. They're just so innocent and being violated in this way.

And I started crying. It was very upsetting. And something of me said, they're my friends. We're friends. My friends are being hurt. And so I just kept on walking and feeling and I started, I saw my dog trotting along and I said, Katie, we're friends, we are friends. And I looked at the sickamora that was hanging over the river and we are friends and paused with each one and felt the sense of by very by naming it, I could feel the the sycamore that was hanging over the river and we are friends and paused with each one and felt the sense of by naming it, I could feel the realness of it, just a tender relatedness. And then I started just widening it to sense the other beings in the world.

And my mind went as it often does to the billions of animals in factory farms that are intelligent pigs and the cows that are kind of gentle creatures, thought of all the chickens. And I just, we are friends, we are friends. And the more I did it, Dan, the more there was a sense of, I could never be alone. It was like a joy in the midst of the sorrow of the suffering. I could never be alone if I could know my relatedness to all beings, all creatures. And if I step back a bit, we humans, and it's nobody's fault, but we have, it's called species, and we feel superior to non-human animals and that they become objects that can satisfy our appetites.

And it's the same mentality, that same hierarchy that lets the earth be an object that's our kind of place for resources and it's our sewer. And it's what's destroying the life systems on the planet. So there's something about this, we are friends' meditation that helps to cut through those separations and help us realize our belonging to the whole web that both is so sweet just to feel I can never be alone. And also then leaves us to acting in ways that don't objectify, that come out of caring and remembrance. And so for me, one of them is I've been a vegan plant-based for a number of years.

I've been actually vegetarian, mostly since I was 20 years old with exception of a few years. And for some people, it's not going to be completely plant-based, but I feel like that needs to be the direction for all of us, for the sake of the planet, for our health, and to wake up out of this idea that others, sentient others are actually objects that we can violate. So that meditation is one of the ones that's really dear to my heart. We are friends. As a vegan slash vegetarian myself, I notice people don't like it when you advise them, give them advice about what to eat or in any way seemingly restrict what they can eat. How do you, how do you manage that? I'm glad you're naming that, and I really understand, because it feels that guilt or anger

or denial or whatever. It's really uncomfortable, because some way the message is coming across. You're a bad person. You're doing something wrong. And also, people have really strong attachments to their food. We all, most of us, do. So it's something that doesn't feel so easy. So for me, when I'm talking about it, rather than saying thou shalt, I name that I know it brings up guilt and reactivity, and I can speak just for myself saying that it brings me some joy to feel the connectedness with all

beings and some sense of alignment that brings some peace. And that I know, and I deeply respect that everybody's got to find their own pathway on this. Before we go, can I get you to plug a little bit your new book, any other book book say you think people might like and any other offerings you're putting out into the world that people might want to know about. Well, thank you for the invitation. Yeah, we've been a lot of this talk has been focusing some of the themes of trusting the gold, which a beautiful gift book it's illustrated and it's really sweet. And if you go to my website, there's some gifts that come with it. And there's I think a lottery for free, from free signed books and so on. You can enter. So that's one.

And the other book I'll mention right now is radical compassion, because so much of the work of, well, how do we be with the most difficult emotions, not to alleviate the intensity as much as to really come into a radically different relationship with them. So they actually become a portal to discovering who we are, to living more in love. So how to do that radical compassion and it centers on the rain practice. And I guess the only other thing I'll mention right now, Dan, is that Jack Cornfield and I offer a meditation teacher

training that is opening for registration in the near future. And if people are interested they can find out about that on my website. It's two-year program, and it's a really powerful program, both for inter-transformation and also to cultivate this capacity to guide other people in something that can bring huge healing to our world. Tara, thank you very much for coming on. My pleasure. I love talking with you.

Thank you. Feeling is your, Chul. Thanks again, Tatarah. Before we head out, let me mention again the free 14 day getting unstuck challenge, which will teach you how to overcome inertia and make the changes you may want to make in your life. This is the time of the year where we're doing a lot of resolution making and then very rapid resolution breaking.

The challenge starts today, January 3rd, over on the 10% happier app, download the app wherever you get your apps to join us. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justin Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, and Jen Poyant with audio engineering from Ultraviolet. Audio will see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode about a very relatable topic burnout.

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