The Courage to Choose Love with Tara Brach

Tricycle Talks - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

Tara Brach discusses courage, love, and collective healing in times of global crisis, emphasizing mindfulness, compassion, and the power of aspiration to counter fear and separation. She shares practices from her new boo

Key takeaways

• Courage is staying open amid suffering.

Transcript preview

So our task as awakening beings as bodysatvas is to really train ourselves to pause and start right where we are with the reality of this moment okay it's like this right now and this belongs to let ourselves really be touched because that's what opens us to grieve and underneath that to love and then we can from that space We have the imagination and the energy and the hope, the courage to create a better future. Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I'm James Sheheen and you just heard Tara Brock. Tara is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and she has been practicing and teaching meditation since 1975. She recently released a new book, The Courageous Heart Work Book, Choosing to Love in perilous times, which is a practical guide for awakening courage and cultivating compassion for ourselves and our world. In my conversation with Tara, we talk about what courage looks like in our current moment, how choosing love can help counter the dangers of what she calls the trance of separation, how we can learn to recognize our own basic goodness, and the power of reconnecting with our aspiration and sense of what matters most. Plus, Tara leads us in a guided meditation. So here's my good. conversation with Tara Brock. So I'm here with meditation teacher Tara Brock. Hi Tara it's great to be with you. Hey James, good to be back talking. So Tara we're here to talk about your new book, The Courageous Heart Work Book, choosing to love in perilous times. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it? Yeah, well it's the perilous times are in that inspired me to write it. because so many people in different teaching circumstances and other networks are experiencing this kind of a spiral into the into a shadow dark ages kind of an experience and so the the big inquiry I found for so many was you know how do I work with what's coming up internally and also how do we respond there's this growing sense that we really are a part of what's going on in the world and it's part of being on this path of compassion to respond. So I decided to write a do a workbook in contrast to another kind of book which is more engaged in the practice so that people would have inner practices that could help them in drawing on the qualities of compassion and courage in engaging in the world. So you begin the book with a question that you and your friends ask one another following the 2024 election. Here it is. If you were at the end of your life looking back, what would be most important about how you live today? So tell us about that question and how it guided you. Yeah, well again, the context for that question is these times have huge amounts of suffering and we're all part of it. I mean, we're breathing the atmosphere. of fear. So it brings up in so many of us, anger, stress, overwhelm. So this inquiry of end of the life looking back, what will matter today? For all of us that were in that little gathering, it was in some way to be able to meet these times with a tender heart, with love, keep on choosing love in response to what's going on. And I can say for myself, I mean, that aspiration to choose love has been with me for a long time and it's more that it gets more deep and immediate that now I can so quickly sense when the reactivity arises as in every day that I take in the news to create a bad other to blame. In those moments it's much more now a part of my to pause and to say again, okay, what does it mean right this moment to choose love? And it doesn't mean that I am in some way ignoring the suffering. It means that I'm meeting that suffering with as much clarity and space and kindness as I can. You know, sorry, you're talking about love and you refer to love as the courage to stay open in a world that breaks our hearts. So can you can. You know, sorry, you're talking about love and you refer to love as the courage to stay open in a world that tell us about that very interesting definition. Yeah, well again in the world we're living in it feels like courage and I think this is a key word in our times. It's this willingness to fully feel what's coming up inside us, to feel the vulnerability, the grief, the fear, and still let care guide our actions. And when I'm teaching, and when I'm teaching, And this is more now, I would say in these last few years than ever before, earlier times, most of the questions and sharing were about people's personal lives. And now it's much more people's being impacted by what's going on in the world. So in a recent webinar, it was my neighbors and the terror of any moment ICE descending upon them are health insurance that I can't afford. anymore or the continuing horror about the Middle East or another my family's in Iran right now you know that kind of thing so what I do now when people share their distress is I'll immediately check and see from the group how many others you know how many others are experiencing this because as soon as we sense it's not my personal fear or horror or whatever it is. But this is in the collective that we're feeling it, not my fear, the fear, not a personal problem. This is a collective suffering. There's a kind of space and wisdom and kindness that comes up. And so I feel like in our current times in this world right now, we really need to feel our belonging with each other because that's what creates space for how much is going on. It gives us the courage to choose love. And maybe by way of example, last month, there is each year a memorial that is held by several organizations. They co-hosted an annual memorial that brings together Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones. So it was held a few weeks ago, and I've attended for several years, and I've attended for several years. And this time had the privilege of guiding part of a virtual event that followed with Valerie Carr. During the memorial, these folks would, they gather and they speak the names and they tell the stories and they grieve side by side. And we need more of this. We need safe spaces for having that courage to feel where we're vulnerable to grieve. Because in the communing, in the vote, in the vote, in the vote, in the community, in the vote. vulnerability in the grieving, something opens. And it was so clear in witnessing this that their pain had not hardened into hatred. It actually became a source of courage. It's like their togetherness gave a felt sense of hope. Like if we can be together in this, then a better world is possible. We can hold this together. So I'm sharing this, James, because courage is needed. And we get our courage when we sense, when we tap into, well, we're part of something larger. We're part of a larger heart, we're part of others that care. And for these people, it really translated into being able to act together for justice, for peace, for a different future, not from hatred, but from care. You know, it's interesting that you talk about courage in this context because I sometimes think of it as the energy to consider to consider to consider as the energy to continue to consider to consider to you talk about people grieving together and you mentioned the word hope. Maybe that inspiration is what would give us energy or being with others. I'm not sure but but people tend to burn out shut down and turn off you know everything around them. I think people burn out shut down, shut down, shut down, and close off when they feel that they're separate. That if we think we're on this Bodysoph path but we're a separate self trying to save the world. good luck, you know, it's gonna be a recipe for burnout That's why moving towards more Collectivity being with each other sharing with each other as soon as we get a taste of belonging to something larger We tap into courage Yeah, you you talk about you know I was thinking in reading through this book about how a collective approach generates energy hope togetherness We're not alone you know I was thinking the trance of separation. Can you say something about that? Well it's all of our predicament. Every one of us has kind of the architecture of the brain and the perception of separateness. So that's natural. We also have the capacity as we wake up to realize who we are beyond that separation and in a way this is the core of the whole spiritual path is sensing the suffering that comes with feeling separate and that suffering wakes us up. You know, it's just so clear in the darkest ages and in the darkest chapters of our life, we get small because we feel separate, threatened, deficient, and if we open to that suffering, if we're willing to, if we have the courage to feel it in our bodies, in our heart, In that opening we discover a larger truth which is that there is a presence a compassion a tenderness a wisdom a larger field that we're part of I often think of it as you know an ocean with waves and when the waves of feeling separate get really strong you know if we open to them we start discovering the oceanness that really does have room. Right I want to talk a little bit about fear. people feel it right now. And you suggest that fear is an energy that only loving presence can embrace. And a loving heart is essential to help awaken us from this trance of separateness and fear. So tell us about how love can help us recognize this trance and shift into a space of belonging. When we're caught in the trance of fear, the first thing that happens is not love. It comes from love, but it's not love. The first thing that's not love. The first thing that's not love. The first thing that's not love. The first thing that's not love. The first thing that is there's some awareness that says, oh, this is happening. There's mindfulness. You know, I usually use the phrase, it's like this right now. And in the moment that we can acknowledge and recognize, it's like this right now, it's radical. It's like all of a sudden, the who we are is not caught in the waves. There's a bit of that oceanness, that larger perspective. And this is the heart of all the Buddhist practices really. Our identity shifts in the moment we can say, it's like this. If we can extend that and sense the this belongs, and I say, and the words again are just this belongs, it's like saying that those waves in the ocean are part of the ocean. It belongs, it's not saying we like them, we don't want to be lost in them, we don't want to be reacting to them, but they're part of reality. And again, this allowing of reality opens us to a larger belonging. Now there's some skills in how to do that because fear is this primitive emotion that contracts us and we forget everything in the moments of fear. It's like we forget how to wake up out of fear. The reason I teach Rein so frequently is because the moments we most need mindfulness and compassion are the moments we most need mindfulness and compassion are the moments of that we forget the very next step. So just having a preset kind of sequence really helps, but recognizing the R of Rain is it's like this. Allowing is, and this belongs. Then we deepen, we can deepen our attention to investigating and investigating is primarily somatic, where we're actually feeling the fear and saying, okay, and this is courage. Let me feel it from. the inside. And I have some ways that people can support themselves in it, which is actually make the face that expresses it and let your body express it, because if you start embodying it, you actually start knowing it from the inside out. And once we get in touch with it somatically, and we can just feel this hurts, you know, then it's possible, and I'm putting my hand on my heart right now to nurture, which just simply make me means bring some tenderness, ultimately to love the fear. Like in the moments that there's a sense of, and I actually invite myself to, I say love this fear, love this fear, there's an amazing shift that happens, which is we become the loving presence that is including the fear, rather than the illusion of a self that's caught in fear. That is, that is, is liberation. Now I want to just add here that when there's trauma, those steps aren't so easy and we usually need somebody else to keep us company and we need plenty of time to resource and find as much safety as possible before we can actually get intimate