More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tara Brach
Read between
April 6 - April 13, 2020
In the normal process of forming memories we evaluate each new situation in terms of a cohesive world view we have formulated. With trauma, this cognitive process is short-circuited by the surge of painful and intense stimulation. Instead of “processing the experience” by fitting it into our understanding of how the world works and thereby learning from it, we revert to a more primitive form of encoding—through physical sensations and visual images. The trauma, undigested and locked in our body, randomly breaks through into consciousness.
Dissociation, while protective, creates suffering. When we leave our bodies, we leave home. By rejecting pain and pulling away from the ground of our being, we experience the dis-ease of separation—loneliness, anxiety and shame. Alice Miller tells us that there is no way to avoid what’s in the body. We either pay attention to it, or we suffer the consequences:
Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body.
As my attention deepened, I began to perceive the sensations throughout my body as moving energy—tingling, pulsing, vibration. Pleasant or not, it was all the same energy playing through me.
When we are free of mental concepts and our senses are awake, the sounds, smells, images and vibrations we experience connect us with all life everywhere. It is not my pain, it is the earth’s pain. It is not my aliveness but simply life—unfolding and intense, mysterious and beautiful. By meeting the changing dance of sensations with Radical Acceptance, we discover our intrinsic belonging to this world. We are “no thing”—not limited to any passing experience—and “everything,” belonging to the whole.
Roger Keyes’s poem “Hokusai Says,” the teachings of a wise Japanese artist remind us of our belonging to life, and of our capacity to open to its fullness. Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention, notice. He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing … He says everything is alive— Shells, buildings, people fish Mountains, trees. Wood is alive. Water is alive. Everything has its own life. Everything lives inside us. He says live with the world inside you … It matters that you care. It matters that you feel. It matters that you notice. It matters that
...more
As you move through the various circumstances of your day, notice what sensations arise in your body. What happens when you feel angry? When you are stressed and racing against time? When you feel criticized or insulted by someone? When you feel excited or happy? Pay particular attention to the difference between being inside thoughts and awakening again to the immediate experience of sensations.
Years later I would realize that the Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
the essence of mindfulness practice: It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.
In teaching the Middle Way, the Buddha guided us to relate to desire without getting possessed by it and without resisting it.
Caught in the trance of unworthiness, our desires fixate on soothing, once and for all, our anxiety about imperfection.
Our sense of self emerges from the ground level of all experience—our reactivity to intense pleasant or unpleasant sensations.
Our most regularly used strategies to get what we want also become a defining part of our sense of self. The overeating, the competing, the people pleasing, feel like me. As we immerse ourselves in the life-consuming pursuit of substitutes, we become increasingly alienated from our authentic desires, our deepest longings for love and belonging.
Sarah had begun seeing how even the most acute cravings eventually subsided if she just sat still, named what was happening and, instead of wishing they’d go away, just said, “This too.” “Suddenly it became clear that all my desires and thoughts and feelings are an endless, changing parade,” she told me. And then, with a look of surprise she added, “I’m not making it happen.”
As Sarah was discovering in meditation, she could experience even the most intense craving without pushing it away or acting on it. Instead of hating her experience or losing herself in a swirl of mental activity, Sarah was saying yes to the feelings of urgency and tension and fear. Instead of trying to satisfy her craving, she was simply letting it express itself and move through her.
The sensations of anxiety and wanting may be unpleasant, but as we saw with pain, the suffering can be optional. We suffer when our experience of desire or craving defines and confines our experience of who we are. If we meet the sensations, emotions and thoughts of wanting with Radical Acceptance, we begin to awaken from the identity of a wanting self and to reconnect with the fullness of our being.
We pause and relinquish our physical or mental pursuit of satisfaction long enough to recognize how our identity has contracted into the feelings and thoughts of a wanting self. In this pause we let go of blaming ourselves for the presence of wanting and kindly allow it to exist, just as it is. We invite our wanting to tea, mindfully experiencing the sensations in our body, wakefully noting the emotions and thoughts that are arising in our mind.
When we bring Radical Acceptance to the enormity of desire, allowing it to be as it is, neither resisting it nor grasping after it, the light of our awareness dissolves the wanting self into its source. We find that we are naturally and entirely in love. Nothing is apart or excluded from this living awareness.
Rumi writes: A strange passion is moving in my head. My heart has become a bird Which searches in the sky. Every part of me goes in different directions. Is it really so That the one I love is everywhere?
Our longings don’t disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.
Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.
In Buddhism, the three fundamental refuges are the Buddha (our awakened nature), the dharma (the path or the way) and the sangha (the community of spiritual aspirants).
A Sanskrit word,dharma means the truth, the way of things, the law of nature. Taking refuge in the dharma is taking refuge in the truth that everything within and around us is subject to change; the truth that if we try to hold on to or resist the stream of experience, we deepen the trance of fear.
As Buddhism has been integrated into the West, the meaning of sangha has come to include all our contemporaries who in various ways are consciously pursuing a path of awakening.
While her own fear had isolated her and made her feel vulnerable, when it became our fear she no longer felt alone. The compassion that arose in her heart was far greater than her fear. By taking refuge in the sangha of mothers who so love their children, she awakened what the Taoists call “the invincible shield of caring,” the safety of abiding in the heart.
Imagine the difference between a herd of wild stallions enclosed in a small corral and those same horses galloping through wide-open plains. This is the difference between seeing life with a narrow focus and widening the lens to a more spacious view. When our field of awareness is open and vast, there is plenty of room for the stallions of fear to kick up dust as they stampede through.
While the mind will continue to generate stories about what we fear, we can recognize the thoughts for what they are and drop under them again and again to connect with the feelings in our body.
When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.
Inhaling, rest in receptive, spacious awareness. Exhaling, relax into openness.
The bodhisattva’s path and teaching is that when we allow our hearts to be touched by suffering—our own or another’s—our natural compassion flowers. The bodhisattva’s aspiration is simple and powerful: “May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion.”
We might begin our prayer by reaching out, and in that way remember the warmth and safety of connectedness. Yet we ground our prayer by reaching inward to the raw feelings of loneliness and fear. Like a great tree, mindful prayer sinks its roots into the dark depths in order to reach up fully to the light. When the pain is deep, the more fully we touch it, the more fully we release ourselves into boundless, compassionate presence.
The poet Longfellow writes, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
our habitual feelings of attraction and aversion do not have to overrule our basic capacity to see that, like us, they suffer and long to be happy. When we see who is really in front of us, we don’t want them to suffer.
Right on the spot you can breathe in, letting yourself feel the immediacy and sharpness of that hurt and fear. Exhaling, release the pain into the openness of awareness, with a prayer for relief. After spending some minutes in this way, enlarge the field of compassion, breathing for all beings who are suffering from loss or trauma or addiction.
Buddhist perspective holds that there is no such thing as a sinful or evil person. When we harm ourselves or others, it is not because we are bad but because we are ignorant. To be ignorant is to ignore the truth that we are connected to all of life, and that grasping and hatred create more separation and suffering. To be ignorant is to ignore the purity of awareness and capacity for love that expresses our basic goodness.
Novelist and mystic Romaine Rolland says, “There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.”
No matter what appears—burning rage, gnawing anxiety, cruel thoughts or utter despondency—by offering forgiveness directly to each, we give permission to our inner life to be as it is. Rather than forgiving a “self,” we forgive the experiences we are identified with.
Each night before going to sleep, I suggested, she might do a “forgiveness scan,” scanning to see if she was holding anything against herself from the day.
We can’t punish ourselves into being a good person. Only by holding ourselves with the compassion of forgiveness do we experience our goodness and respond to our circumstances with wisdom and care.
The contemporary Indian master Bapuji lovingly reminds us to cherish our goodness: My beloved child, Break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself you break your own heart. You stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your vitality. The time has come, your time To live, to celebrate and to see the goodness that you are … Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obstruct you If one comes, even in the name of “Truth,” forgive it for its unknowing Do not fight. Let go. And breathe—into the goodness that you are.
We can’t will ourselves to forgive—forgiving is a product not of effort but of openness. This is why the intention to forgive is such a key element in the process. To be willing but not quite ready to forgive holds the door open a crack.
We forget that every person, including ourselves, is new every moment.
