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You are listening to Insights at the Edge. Today I speak with Tara Brach. Tara is an author, clinical psychologist, and the founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. She is the author of the Sounds True audio learning program Radical Acceptance, a Buddhist guide to freeing yourself from shame, as well as meditations for emotional healing. Today I talk with Tara about Radical Acceptance in the face of difficult emotions.
Hi Tara, Welcome.
Tara Brach: Hi.
Tami Simon: Sounds True publishes lots of different programs on working with emotions, and one of the things I have noticed is that sometimes some of the authors talk about something that they call negative emotions, and you know, I am always like, well, negative emotions—anger, fear, even sometimes sorrow, being lost in sorrow, or depression—these can be negative. So I am curious if you have a view. Do you think any of the emotions are “negative”?
Tara Brach: I don’t use the word negative. And the reason is that every emotion feels like it has intelligence and that our nervous systems were designed to have them for a reason. And that when they cause suffering, rather than being negative, is just when our sense of being has gotten identified with them. So it is not that it is bad. It is not something bad happening as much as we have lost sight of who we are and our sense of self is now identified with “I have to have that” or “that I hate.” There is a kind of contracting and a losing sight of something. In that way they can cause harm, but they are not negative. And any emotion can do that.
Tami Simon: Well, even…people think an emotion that is positive would be something like joy.
Tara Brach: Yeah, and you can become attached to joy and “I’m a joyful person, and if I don’t feel joyful my spiritual path is in some way not being fruitful.”
It is like all of them are passing states. They are all biochemical, subtle-energy or gross-energy states that, like the outside, they come and go. And if our sense of who we are and how things should be are hitched to them then we are in trouble, because they will come and go. So the real freedom is in relating to the emotions. They are waves in the ocean that rise and pass, but they don’t define us.
Tami Simon: So let’s take an emotion that we don’t have to call negative, but is clearly difficult, very difficult, for people. Something like shame, which I know is something that you’ve written about and teach about. So I am feeling this incredible sense of shame about some way that I’ve acted. Now what is the intelligence in shame? Seems like it is…I mean, I feel terrible, what could be intelligent about this?
Tara Brach: Yes, I know. I have wondered that. When I started trying to research animals, because usually you can find out if it is rigged in the mammals there is some survival function, and there is a survival function in shame. There is an upwelling of that kind of clutch that you’ve stepped outside the boundary of what is okay for your collective community and that physical sensation lets you know you better hide it or back off, because if you show it you’ll get excommunicated in some way.
So it is a signal that you’ve stepped outside something. Now, it may be that it is rare, I think, these days. We’ve got it so hyped that it is not useful. I mean we’ve got so many standards that we’re trying to meet that if we don’t meet we feel a sense of shame about—that most times shame is really proliferated and causes harm. We get possessed by it and so on. But it can be just a signal and it can tell us to back off—go to the left, go to the right.
Tami Simon: Can you tell me in the animal kingdom, the natural kingdom, how does shame appear? What species doing what?
Tara Brach: Well, dogs feels shame. They know when they’ve in some way done something their owners don’t want them to do. The tail between the legs is shame. So it helps to get cooperation, but it is misused. And, you know, as I said, I rarely see shame being something that ends up being useful in this culture.
Tami Simon: Now in an animal it is pretty quick. I mean, the tail between the legs is, we’re talking…
Tara Brach: And that is the difference between humans and animals. Because of our thinking mind and because we do so much remembering and planning, rather than the flicker that emotion can be, it locks in. We do this looping. Or we have thoughts that create these feelings and these feelings generate more thoughts and then we get locked into…or it becomes a mood. We get habituated and then our sense of self actually gets identified with that mood. So it becomes less useful. And that is why so much of the freedom comes when we can pause and begin to not believe the thoughts and just contact the raw sensation.
Over and over again I watch how people wake up out of the grip of really painful emotions, when they are really identified, and the sequence always involves a pausing. I call it the sacred pause because we tumble into the future. We are constantly in this kind of reactivity on our way to what is next—and we do it emotionally too. This thought creates this. So, pausing creates a space to actually deepen presence. And in that space, unless the presence is brought to how the feeling is in the body, there is no freedom, because the identification will still be there. But if you can pause enough to feel the feeling in the body, then there is a loosening and a kind of re-arriving in a sense of presence that is home, that is more of what we are. And then we can begin to see emotions again as passing, coming and going.
Tami Simon: Now of course I can imagine what you are saying if the emotional experience—and let’s just stick with shame—isn’t that strong of a grip. But how do you generate a pause when you are really taken over by an emotional experience?
Tara Brach: It might be a long way down the track. In other words, we eventually do pause. I mean, there is no healing without some, “Oh this is what is happening. Okay.” And some shift in how we are relating, too. So there is a movement from reacting-to to relating-to, but it may happen way down the track and part of the practice of meditation is that the lag time gets less. You have the same triggers and the same reactions, but more quickly awareness remembers. There is some remembering, and some pausing.
I’ve been really valuing the acronym RAIN as a kind of assistance in remembering, because when we are in an emotional reaction it is such a trance. We are so believing that something is wrong, and to me that is almost like the undercurrent of all emotional suffering: is something is wrong? And usually something is wrong with me.
Tami Simon: Now it could be that the person…or that something is wrong. I mean, I just binged and ate ten brownies and I feel terrible about myself and my stomach aches. Something is wrong.
Tara Brach: So there is a difference between wise discernment, which says this behavior caused this harmful reaction and my body hurts. That is wise discernment, and I am bad. The aversive judgment.
Tami Simon: So it is not bad that I ate ten brownies and feel terrible right now?
Tara Brach: No, you are not bad. That behavior caused a harmful experience. So if you want to say it is bad that it happened, and not say I am bad, that would be at least teasing it apart some. But the reason we suffer is because very quickly the self owns it, there is a sense of I am bad, or else you are bad. And as long as we are living in a world where something is wrong, you are bad, or I am bad, there is a basic dividedness that stops us from being at home.
So I was going to talk about RAIN.
Tami Simon: So this is an acronym so “R” stands for something…unpack it for me.
Tara Brach: Yeah. It is a useful one. I feel like the sickness in this world is homesickness in some way, that we have left home, they we are in a trance and feeling like the self is separate, feeling like the self is bad. So that is the given of when it is suffering. And RAIN is a way of out if we can pause so we can come back home…so here is the acronym. The R is Recognize, and on some level there is, okay, recognize I just binged. I feel really bad. And the A is Allow, and what that means is you are in a way pausing and saying, okay, I am going to allow. This is the actuality. I am allowing that this is what is true; it is like acknowledging truth. Allowing. Just not trying to do anything about it. So it is Recognize and Allow.
And then the I is Investigate. And that is just a deepening of the Recognizing, because if it is something light, if it is not a heavy emotional tangle, all you need to do is pause and just recognize and allow it. And recognizing it and allowing it, there is no longer an identification. But if it is a tangle, you need to deepen presence and really investigate what is really happening, you know. What am I needing? What am I fearing? What am I believing? That kind of thing. The I also has the quality of intimacy. You can’t investigate unless there is a quality of warmth or kindness. I know many people who try to investigate their experience but there is a subtle aversion or coldness and it doesn’t reveal itself. So I is an intimate investigation, and when you’ve been present with the shame, when the “I” binges desserts, in a really intimate way the identification dissolves. And there is still hurt. You still may be bloated. There still may be sorrow about it, but the sense of who you are is not identified any longer.
Tami Simon: So what dissolves this feeling of “I am a terrible person for doing this”?
Tara Brach: A profound presence. In other words, the more presence there is, the awareness itself dissolves the identification. When there is awareness of what is happening, the sense of our being resides in our awareness and the currents are still there, but you are not hitched to them. And that is the N of rain, which is Not Identified. So the Recognize, Allow, Investigate if you need to with intimacy, the fruit of that is not being identified. And I also think of N as Natural Presence. That you have relaxed back open into, or come back home to, Natural Presence.
Tami Simon: It is nice. “Rain” is such a nice word. It is soft. It is also like crying.
Tara Brach: Exactly. And the rain rains down equally on everything. And it dissolves the selfing. It dissolves the identification with the self. And again, it is a take it or leave it kind of acronym, but when we are in trance it is so confusing and there is so much reactivity that to have some simple way of remembering…it is really remembering.
Tami Simon: Now it is interesting that you use this word “trance” because I think most people might think of that word in a different way—as an altered state or something like that. But you are meaning it in a specific way. The trance.
Tara Brach: Yeah. I think of a trance as like a dream, when there is a larger reality, but our perception has narrowed and fixated. So only perceiving a fragment and it is a distortion. And the deep trance that most of us are living in is that there is a separateness. And that there is a self here. And usually along with that is that the self is somehow falling short.
Tami Simon: So there really can’t be an experience like shame unless there is some belief in self. Otherwise you wouldn’t feel ashamed. Would you?
Tara Brach: I am not sure, by the way. Because, again, it has been reported that the kind of biochemistry of shame is in other mammals, and I don’t know how much thought process and self-consciousness there is. But I do know that the suffering of shame involves a sense of self. So it might be that there is a wave of some sort of emotional contraction that is a message of, oh, you stepped outside the line. But as soon as you have a conception of a self, and that the self is bad, that’s the trance.
Tami Simon: So maybe that shame wouldn’t last in a prolonged way, unless…
Tara Brach: So that the identification could lock in. Yeah, I think that is kind of what it is. I’d like to know more about animal research. It is interesting. Because we do have the same emotions; they just proliferate and cause suffering in humans.
Tami Simon: Now I am curious in your own life if you’ve invoked the RAIN acronym, let’s say in the last year, in something you might be going through. And what that might have been like for you, and how it worked.
Tara Brach: Oh, I do it a lot. And it is very quick for me. Mostly RAIN is RA. It is mostly this recognizing and allowing what is happening, and the allowing gets deeper and deeper so that there really is not a resistance to…in the moment there is no resistance. There is a disillusion of any sense of self. But I get plenty of opportunity that I have to actually investigate more.
And I guess the big one, and this has been the last few years, if I have a place where I have dedicated more, had a more focused attention, it has been around blame, around judgment and blame. And it has just gotten clearer and clearer that any time I am blaming anybody, blaming myself or blaming anybody, it is a story and it is causing separation. And if I believe the story I am in a trance that is painful. I’ve left home. So I have gotten very intention. It has been very purposeful to not believe my beliefs about you are wrong or I am wrong. That has been like a sadhana.
Tami Simon: You mean by the word “sadhana,” spiritual practice?
Tara Brach: Spiritual practice, where I am much more intentional.
Tami Simon: Can you give me a specific example of what kinds of situations might evoke blame in you?
Tara Brach: Yes. So if I am with my family of origin and I have some evaluation that everybody is doing things wrong, they are not doing them according to my agenda. Or, I got married three years ago, so I have a later in life marriage, which is really a wonderful experience, and I am finding, just as we were talking about earlier, that is the place where I can’t believe myself. That I get into such a small judgy kind of place of how things should be. And so there is suffering in it, because when there is blame then I feel like I am closed hearted. And I am just not the loving person I want to be. So the process has been interesting because I have a real wanting for there not to be judgment, and so I’ll do RAIN and in a way it is like a bargain of mine. Like, “I will be really with this, investigate, open to it, be intimate with it, so that it will go away.” And so it is not truly allowing. And so I get to the point where a judgment will come up and I will say, okay, don’t believe it, feel the rawness under it, and I will feel under it that the need is to be seen, and he is just not seeing me, and so therefore I am judging him for it. I will get that, and then offer myself the seeing, and I will be with it deeply, and then there will be the non-identification. I will feel very spacious, and things are coming and going. And then judgment comes right back up again.
And so I hit this place where, and this is what was so interesting, where I got very, very deeply the sense of this despair that I couldn’t stop the judgments from coming, that I was just kind of destined. It is like the self that is trying to get out of the trance that is destined to keep judging. And what was really powerful is in the moment that I profoundly registered that there was no way to control it, that there was no agent in here that could control the judging, in that moment there was a surrendering. I can’t even say I surrendered. It was like a surrendering to, oh, this is truth, this is how it is. Judging just keeps happening. And in that surrendering, there was a realization that it is not a self that is judging. But it wasn’t an idea. It was like judging happens but it is not my fault. It is just happening.
And there was a profound compassion that kind of opened up that has been more of the place of resting, where judging happens but it quicker to not only believe it but to really get that it is not something that reflects badly on the self. And it is not generated by self. It is just happening. And so there is a lot more of a field of compassion holding it than before when I was struggling to get rid of it.
Tami Simon: You know that is interesting. Judging just happens. Do you think if you investigate what the roots of the judgments are, and I have judgments in these kinds of situations about these kinds of things, wouldn’t you potentially find something from your own earlier biography that would be the roots of it? So it is not like it just happens; it is that you don’t potentially understand why it is happening?
Tara Brach: I would say judging is definitely conditioned. But the most existential conditioning we all have. I mean, the reason judging is universal. Comparing mind and judging mind is considered to be the last mental dualistic activity to dissolve.
Tami Simon: Interesting.
Tara Brach: And the sequence of awakening described in the Buddhist scriptures is because…
Tami Simon: Can you describe the sequence? I am curious how…
Tara Brach: Each of the steps?
Tami Simon: Yeah. What are some of the big other things that dissolve before judging?
Tara Brach: Certain kinds of grasping. Certain kinds of jealousy. Certain kinds of anger. But there is something about comparing mind, the subtly of this, that, and then having an evaluation placed on it that is the last of the discriminations of a dualistic mind.
Tami Simon: Interesting.
Tara Brach: So there is a conditioning that is very existential. It has to do with separate, something is wrong, and then assigning blame as a way to control. Because as soon as you can say, oh that is the cause, then there is a sense of controlling, if I know the cause. If I know you a wrong for doing such and such I can fix you and make you different. So while I might have my own karmic sequence of what made me decide certain things were wrong, the tendency to blame is pretty fundamental. It is beyond my own personal history.
Tami Simon: So what you are saying now is that when judging or blame emerges you notice yourself, whether you are comparing with someone else or you are blaming someone or putting down somebody, you know…the metaphor I use for it is in certain situations I notice myself kind of finding a shelf I can stand on. And I am like, why am I finding a shelf that is relative to their shelf? What am I doing? You are saying you recognize that and you allow it. Now what about the second two steps?
Tara Brach: Well, when there is a real tangle I will investigate it…
Tami Simon: How do you do that?
Tara Brach: If I am judging and if I am angry, and if I ask myself the question, “If I didn’t
have an aversive judgment, if I wasn’t blaming you, what would I have to feel?”
Tami Simon: What do you mean by aversive judgment?
Tara Brach: So let’s say with my husband I have some critique like he is not really slowing down and paying attention the way I want him to to something that feels profound and important. And I am aversive meaning I am angry, that feels negative, I feel like that is a put down to him. He is not deep enough to be paying attention the way I want him to. That’s what I mean by an aversive judgment.
Tami Simon: So you are pulling back a little bit somehow…
Tara Brach: Or pushing him away. So let’s say I have an aversive judgment; I am pushing him away. Then I will say if I couldn’t be having that story of something is wrong with him, what would I have to feel? So I’ll just say if I wasn’t believing that…and always underneath the aversive judgment there is either a sense of hurt or a sense of fear. There is a hurt like, he doesn’t really want to be with me. Or a fear of I will never be seen. So if I can get in touch and investigate what the unmet need is underneath the blaming belief, then compassion and softening starts happening. And I often use this gesture when I teach…there is a capacity, either physically or energetically, to offer a sense of kindness and tenderness to that place that has a need. And I no longer am fixating on what is wrong with you; I am responding to the unmet need. And that starts to dissolve in the sense of self. Because as soon as I become the compassionate presence I am no longer positioning inside the meaty self.
And the whole of freedom is a shift in identity. I mean, the whole path is waking up from a story of a self that is either “I am wrong” and a self that thinks others are wrong, to that presence and that tenderness that is just awake.
Tami Simon: So how would you say you experience your identity then now?
Tara Brach: In what moment?
Tami Simon: This one.
Tara Brach: In this moment? Well there is a happiness right now, just to name a mood. Because we are playing and exploring a terrain that is really alive for me. And so it feels right now like there is this kind of dynamism and tenderness and excitement, but not that it is happening to a self or that a self is doing something. And I don’t feel like you are a self in there and I am a self in here, but more of a sense of there is a field of awakeness and that it is holding this conditioning of these body-minds that are interacting. And that there is a warmth in it. So that is why there is the happiness, because there is not so much of a location in here. There is much more of a field that is sweet.
Tami Simon: Now you very briefly alluded to the fact that you and I were having a conversation before this conversation, where we were talking about how in your intimate relationships, marriage partner or close family relationships, that that is where the baggage can often surface the most, no matter how expanded you’ve been in different situations, disciplines, etc. So why is that? Why is it that the places that trigger us…why do they happen in our intimate relationships the most?
Tara Brach: That’s where there is the most attachment. People that are the closest there is…we’ve fixed most of our needs and our hopes and therefore our fears around those relationships, so we hold on the most tightly to wanting them to be a certain way. And we freak out when they are not.
Tami Simon: Makes sense.
Tara Brach: One of the things I watch is that when, and this happens for everyone I know, that that there is the most pushing away and most grasping with the people closest to us. And that when we lock into that “something is wrong,” and “making other wrong,” back up and say…I was very touched by a story from an African tribe that I thought was really quite beautiful. This tribe has a thing called the Drowning Man’s Trial, where if somebody is murdered, the family has to mourn for a year. But then they put the killer on this boat, put him out on the river. They tie up his hands and his legs. And then they throw him into the river. And the family has to decide whether to swim out and save him or whether to let him drown. And they believe that if they let him drown they will have justice, but they will mourn for the rest of their lives. But if they accept that things aren’t always fair and that things that are painful happen, and they save him, they will have a way of healing. And they believe that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.
Tami Simon: That is very deep. I am going to have to think about that for a moment, Tara.
Tara Brach: So vengeance meaning any, whether it is the vengeance of just resentment, because resentment is a form of vengeance, just playing the story over again. Or whether it is the vengeance of going to war. When out of our pain we act out, then what we’ve done is we’ve moved away from the one place where there can be healing and freedom. And so with the people closest to us, there is a constant subtle dynamic of trying to control how it is, push away with this judgment, and in the moments that instead of reacting we just stay, we just stay, and open to what is under there, in that opening we can find the truth of who we are. I mean, that is really what we are…kind of waking up out of the small self that needs to control and coming into that field again.
But I have been emphasizing the blame piece because I feel like it is so big, and it is big in our intimate relationships and it is the war that is on this planet all the time. A constant cycle of activity of playing out the vengeance. And the whole evolution of consciousness has to do with being able to pause and realize that that vengeance is just going to continue in that sense of separate selves.
Tami Simon: Now what would you say to somebody who says, “When I really get identified with something that is going, that we will call a difficult emotion, I just don’t know how to pause. I just don’t know how to do it. Like I can do it when I am practicing my meditation or when things are not that difficult or…but when I am actually having a really hard time I can’t pause. I don’t know where the emergency break is. I try, but it won’t stop. It won’t stop the whole emotional attach from taking me over.”
Tara Brach: Well, I’d say a couple of things. One is when the person is not in emotional reactivity to really reflect on their longing and their aspiration, because I think of the whole path as intention and attention and that if our intention is sincere, like if we are really in touch with what matters, that is going to energize remembering. So the more moments that…like even right now that we say to ourselves if each of us pauses and really says what really matters, I mean right this moment what matters the most, and when I do that, it is really loving presence. In some way to remember and realize and live from loving presence and that immediately softens my heart, immediately there is less of a shape and felt sense of a self. There is just more tenderness.
And so for someone that can’t pause when there is more space, reflect on the most important thing. The most important thing is to remember the most important thing. And that almost sets up an invitation or gravitational field so that when they are in the thick there is a little more remembering to come back.
Tami Simon: So that is the intention part. And you are saying the attention…
Tara Brach: That allows us to pay attention. Really our intention is to pay attention. And there are so many techniques and so many practices our there, and it is so clear that it doesn’t matter which one…the changes I’ve seen in all of us in waking up is coming out of this very sincere longing to be free and that longing is like the voice of awareness calling us home. And the more that we listen to it and inhabit it, really inhabit the longing and trace it back and be the longing, the more there is belonging to what is true.
So I’ve more and more, especially these last few years, I feel like it is a very deep practice to sense the prayerfulness in us.
Tami Simon: That’s a funny thing for a Buddhist to say.
Tara Brach: You think?
Tami Simon: Not really, but people sometimes think so. So what do you mean by the prayerfulness? To what are you praying to?
Tara Brach: I am praying to what I am. I am calling on what I am. It is like when I am praying there is a prayer that says, “Please love me.” And I have some kind of image of light and kind of the bodhisattva of compassion and so when there is a sense of separateness, there is a longing that is please love me, and then it goes deeper than that. It is “please may I just be love.” Just being it. And when I pray and say “please love me” there comes a tenderness and a receptivity that lets in life, because it was kind of like that—I am separate. And when that happens there is a realization that there is nothing out there, that I already am the love, but I had to go through…it is like John O’Donahue said that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. And so in separation feeling the longing and reaching out and letting in allows us to dissolve back into that the loving presence and longing for is what I am. So it is kind of trick in a way, but it is a wise trick. And the longing is…in any moment that there is not belonging there is some longing to come home.
Tami Simon: Yes, you mentioned that phrase before: homesickness. So what is home? What is home for you?
Tara Brach: Home is what we are. I mean, home is the silence and the awakeness and the tenderness that is here. And the only suffering is in some way forgetting that.
Tami Simon: Now I know that you were both as a clinical psychologist—and you still see clients.
Tara Brach: No.
Tami Simon: Not anymore? So when did you stop seeing clients?
Tara Brach: Oh probably about three years ago.
Tami Simon: Okay, well I think my question will still hold up, so you’ve spent many, much of your time…
Tara Brach: Many years. Decades.
Tami Simon: working with clients. And here you are, of course, an author and a speaker and a teacher. But you are also working as a meditation instructor. And what I am curious about is the difference when you are working with somebody as a meditation teacher and when you are working with them as a therapist. And do you see a difference in the sort of unfolding process that people go through in a psychological…through working with a therapist versus what they go through working with a meditation path. Or how do you see these two things? Is it one thing? Is it two things?
Tara Brach: It is one thing I would say with different emphasis at different times. And it depends on the relationship where the emphasis is. So that is a broad one. But to be more specific. If I had to describe the healing process…I sometimes use Jung’s phrase “the unlived life”; I feel like there is tangles that are too painful to be with directly, so we create these strategies not to be with them. And that healing is bringing awareness to the tangles and letting them be included in the wholeness of being. And that it is the same thing with learning theory: the way change happens is that you can re-experience the same thing, but if you have added resources there is a new learning. And it is the same thing in spiritual life: that if you take the same experience you’ve had before—the same anger, the same blame, or whatever—but bring a deeper quality of kindness or noticing or whatever, those added resources shift your sense of who you are in relationship to the experience. And it changes the whole experience.
And so in therapy, the same thing is happening. It is happening in the relational field because instead of me along processing my own story I am with you, and your care and your presence adds a new quality which then changes my relationship to the story. So that is on one level there is a shift. In meditation, it tends to go more deep because there is a very clear recognition of the story as not to get rid of it, but the story is a gateway into where the felt sense is in the body. And some Western therapies go into that more than others. But if they don’t there is a limit to how much untangling can happen.
Tami Simon: Do you think there is a limit to meditation without a therapeutic component that…in terms of getting into some of the tangles? If you are just sort of meditating on your own you won’t necessarily…
Tara Brach: I do. I do because the relational field is really important. It is like when the Buddha taught the three refuges, one of the refuges is sangha, which is the relational field, and we can meditate and still be inside this trance story of a self meditating herself to freedom. And it is very, very subtle, this sense of “I am going to meditate and I am going to bring RAIN to my stuff and I am going to wake myself up out of such and such,” and there is still some veil of delusion that I am doing something. And in the relational field you start touching into the realness of this togetherness that actually cuts through the trance in a very profound way. So therapy is not a light thing; it actually wakes us up out of separation.
Also, when there has been trauma, a lot of meditations cause people to get re-traumatized.
Tami Simon: Can you explain that?
Tara Brach: Yeah. Especially in the early days I would say in all of the Buddhist traditions people would come and the instructions would be kind of Rumi’s “Guest House”: open the doors and invite in all the demons and bring mindfulness and done. And if there is a lot of trauma and you open the door to it and you don’t have the resilience and the space and the stability, you are just rerunning the same trauma through, and without anything added it is re-traumatizing. It deepens the neuro-pathways and the grooves and the samskaras and so on.
Tami Simon: You mean by samskaras the…?
Tara Brach: The patterning of beliefs and feelings that have been grooved into our identity. So that was a kind of innocent but ignorant beginnings of meditation in this country. Not recognizing that some people with trauma would not benefit by directly going into mindfulness practice. And instead they needed more building affect tolerance, or building a capacity of “be with.”
And so for many people that I have worked with, and this is not just clinically this is at retreats, if somebody comes and there are just beginning to open up to really big abuse or fear or terror, rather than saying, “okay let’s be with it,” I’ll spend time helping them to develop a refuge, some resource that gives them a sense of safety and belonging and love, that gives them enough of a space of a field of caring, that they actually have the capacity to be with what is so scary without getting possessed.
Tami Simon: Okay, so let’s just slow down a little bit. So building affect tolerance. What does that mean?
Tara Brach: When we’ve been traumatized, there is, and they are not able to track this biochemically—there is almost like a singeing so the pathways between the limbic system and the cerebral cortex are not the pathways that are interfered with, so you don’t have access to some of your normal adult perspectives, you don’t have access to memories that could be good coping strategies. The experience is that I am that young scared child, absolutely helpless and terrified. There are no resources. So if you’ve been traumatized and you are meditating, you need to find some pathways back to resources before just bringing straightforward mindfulness to what is going on.
Tami Simon: And, I mean, would potentially a sense of being able to be resources let’s say in the feeling of the lower belly, can you find resource in your own body in some way? Or…?
Tara Brach: Yes. That’s a great question. Because there are different domains of resources. So there are simple resources like people’s hands. Usually a lot of people who have been traumatized, asking them to be with their breath is not helpful; sometimes there is a sense of suffocating and not being able to catch their breath. The belly is often difficult because most of our gut existential fears are a clench in the belly. Once there are resources, later on, being able start to soften the belly into the resources actually starts undoing the most core sense of self. That is a whole other subject, because each chakra you can start undoing the way the self is perceived in that chakra. But simple body resources such as the hands, if you can just soften the hands, you begin to send a message to the nervous system to relax. And the hands generally are a really good anchor and the feet can be. And sometimes feeling our whole body sitting on the earth, you know, grounding. So that is one level.
Another is just having someone else present. That is just so important. And then, what I usually do is ask questions to find out…so if you are really in a frightened place, when do you ever feel safe, when do you ever feel protected, when do you feel some sense of loving connection with somebody? So I will kind of investigate myself that person’s resource repertoire. And sometimes the only connections like the way my dog looks at me, there is no human, sometimes I can lean against a tree and the tree absolutely is strong enough for me to lean against it. And so I will take any tendril that people have of feeling the earth or another being, and sometimes it is a deity. And then the idea is to build on that until they have really good access, they get really familiar with the safety or tenderness or belonging there.
And once that’s there, then we’ll start accessing where the frightening, raw feelings are and go in and out. You know, just go in enough to feel it, but then make sure to sense the resource there.
Tami Simon: So what happens in that alternation between the dredging up of the trauma and the sense of being resourced, that creates healing?
Tara Brach: Initially there is a total identification with the rawness, such as “that is me.” And when you start going back and forth you start sensing that that exists but there is larger sense of being that has room for it. So eventually it is if you can trust the ocean, you are not afraid of the waves. I mean, that is eventually where it goes. If you can trust this beingness, this resourcefulness, as home, the waves can be really big and there is room. And that is ultimately…it is a profound shift of identity.
But I am not trying to make it sound simple or short. I mean I know people that have been for years now building their resource states and living the unlived life that way.
Tami Simon: And you are saying that that process of finding a resource whether it is a body-based resource or could happen through a meditation process or through a therapy process…
Tara Brach: Exactly.
Tami Simon: That it is a similar alternation between ocean and wave emerging.
Tara Brach: And learning to find these resources. I call it taking refuge, because it is truth. We are taking refuge in what is true. I mean whether it is the look in our dogs’ eyes it is still the tendril to the truth of loving presence. And nobody can be alive and survive in a body without having some tendrils. So even the people that say, “There is no love in my life, and there is no safety,” there is something.
Tami Simon: Why are you saying that with such definitive…?
Tara Brach: Because I have never seen it otherwise, or else people die. It is like the monkeys that were deprived of touch absolutely died, but if there is enough touch there is some link, and that link is their belonging. So you can build on that.
Tami Simon: Now you use this interesting metaphor: the tangles within us. That there is this tangle within us, that we distanced ourselves from these tangles, and I think that implicit in what you were saying is that part of the process of opening to this greater sense of resource is that these will become untangled. Is that the idea? And then what are the tangles to begin with? Are we talking about the untangling here?
Tara Brach: The tangles are our core beliefs that something is wrong or something is missing, that I am separate or unlovable or that I will always fail, that I can’t trust you. And they are not just beliefs; they are beliefs with a felt sense. And we have a whole lot of core tangles and tangles make them sound more solid. They are processes. And the sense of being gets identified with them.
Tami Simon: What do you mean “processes”?
Tara Brach: They are processes of thoughts and feelings that trigger and loop and move and respond to the environment and then contribute to the environment. It is all a very interdependent universe. But they are identifiable patterns, is the best I can say without making it solid.
So tangles are identifiable moving patterns that have a lot of charge and that our sense of self is organized around. And part of our sense of self is the way that we try not to feel the rawness and part of our sense of self is the way we feel completely trapped in the rawness. So it is the whole way that we are in relationship with these basic beliefs that are ignorance, that do not see what we are. And so how the waking up happens from these identified process is that awareness sees the tangle. And that is basically what is happening: is that awareness is what we are. And awareness gradually sees itself. It sees the tangles, and it sees the energy underneath the tangles. And in seeing there is freeing. So in any moment that there is a real seeing of “oh, judging is happening,” it hurts, there is no way to control it. In that seeing there is the freeing from the sense of a self that is judging.
Tami Simon: Let’s pause for a moment on that one. In the seeing there is a sense of freeing from the self. Okay, that makes sense.
Tara Brach: We are not getting rid of the fear or even necessarily the tendency to judge. There is still judging. Or the jealousy or the hurt. That is not what seeing gets rid of. Seeing dissolves the sense of identification with it. Because in the moment of seeing the “what we are” is abiding in “that which is seeing,” and we are no longer positioned in that sense of self that is owning the experience. There is a shift in positioning. That isn’t exactly the way it is, but that is a language for it. So we are residing in something bigger.
Tami Simon: Now Tara, you and I spent time together when you recorded your original program with Sounds True on Radical Self-Acceptance and that was how many years ago?
Tara Brach: It was probably about six years ago.
Tami Simon: Six years ago. And, you know, I commented when I saw you, when we were sitting down here together, that to me you’ve just opened, expanded, grown, dissolved your sense of self, woken up further, whatever language we might want to use for it, that you have just blossomed so gorgeously. And what I am curious about is what your experience is of that, both for yourself and in the work you’ve been doing and what you are seeing happening around you. Both.
Tara Brach: I sense that there is an evolution of consciousness happening, just happening. It is just happening. And it is happening through these body minds that awareness is recognizing itself as these forms are being forms. And that it is really speeding up. And this is a little more on the earth plane level, but it feels like whether it is the intelligence of the web, that there is just this communication that makes us more intelligent, just between the left brain and the right brain. If the corpus callosum is thick there is more communication. I just sense it is happening and it is speeding up. And some of the signs of trance to me are being speedy and judging and leaving our bodies. And my sense in this evolution of consciousness is that there is more and more of a sense of pausing and listening, deepening attention. And I was talking about intention and attention. And more of a conscious longing to realize who we are and live from that. And I am sensing that in more and more beings, more consciously, from all walks. And it is amazing. I mean, just everywhere I go. That the one who is looking out is the same who is looking out from in here and to the extent that there is homesickness there is a longing to come back and know what we are, and see through the mask that we see others as. Just seeing that more and more.
Tami Simon: And do you have any interpretation of that phenomenon?
Tara Brach: You mean how it is possible that it is happening?
Tami Simon: Why it is happening? Why now?
Tara Brach: One of the things I think is a misunderstanding in Buddhism is that ignorance is bad, or that sense of self is bad. I think that there is this natural unfolding going on whereby awareness naturally takes itself to be a form. And it also by nature recognizes that that is happening and wakes up to be in a form and yet in remembering the oceaness. And I don’t understand in terms of the time of history on earth how that happens. There is something that just feels natural. That is just unfolding through all of us. And even though I don’t think there is a self that can do anything about it, there is a kind of skillful attitude towards that, a kind of cooperator to be available. And part of it has to do with being willing to slow down and having an intention not to believe our thoughts. And I am seeing more and more people just choosing that way, to kind of get aligned with this evolution of consciousness.
Tami Simon: Great. Thank you, Tara. It is great to be with you.
Tara Brach: And you. Really. What a pleasure.
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