Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Tara
It just seemed like such a tragedy that we can go through decades and on some level feel like we're not okay.
Lee
That's Tara Brach, mindfulness meditation teacher, psychologist, and author of several international best-selling books.
Tara
We have amazing potential to change some of the habits that cause ourselves or others harm, but we won't be able to access that if we're at war with ourselves.
Lee
Today, wisdom for dealing with all manner of mental turmoil, depression, fear, addiction, and more.
Tara
Making friends with or being at peace with how we are in the moment is the precondition to transformation.
Another way of saying it is, we just have to stop being at war with reality.
Lee
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
We host several live variety shows throughout the year, and I hope one of these days you'll make your way to Nashville or find us out on the road and come join us.
Typically, the first set at the top of the set list is labeled, "warm up," assigned to me. So, I'll go out on stage and talk with the audience and ask where folks are from, make a few jokes, announce a few housekeeping items, because we don't want your cell phone going off in the middle of a live taping, stuff like that.
But then, just before we really start the show, we do something rather... well, odd. Maybe even counter cultural. We all take a few deep breaths together, all the audience, and then we sit in silence together. Maybe a few hundred, maybe almost a couple of thousand folks, just sitting in quiet together for 60 seconds.
It's just a minute, but [00:02:00] it's in that shared space when folks seem to really arrive. I mean, sure, they've been in their seats prior to that moment, but the quiet allows the mind to show up to the body. And we all, quite literally, come to our senses.
That is, we feel the creaks of the pews, say, in the old Ryman Auditorium. Or we hear the remarkable silence of the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall. Or we note the sensations in our bodies. All realities of which we were unconscious of just a few moments earlier.
The silence creates a palpable collective presence, and out of that, the first few notes of the opening theme arrive at that moment more poignant than otherwise possible. What happens in that collective pause is fundamentally what today's conversation is about.
Today, I talk with psychologist and meditation teacher, Tara Brach. And to set the table for that conversation, I'm going to do something right now that will feel perhaps a bit odd on a [00:03:00] podcast, where silence is feared. We're going to stop, for a mere 15 seconds, something you will rarely hear on a podcast, at least not intentionally so.
So join me, if you will, for the next 15 seconds, with a sense of non-judgmental curiosity, and ask yourself, simply, what's happening inside of me?
Here we go.
Thank you for sharing that 15 seconds of silence. And if you're still wondering what in the world that was all about, well, you'll learn as we dive deep into the transformative power of pausing, as we simply allow whatever is happening inside of us.
Please enjoy this conversation with Tara Brach.
Tara Brach is a meditation teacher, [00:04:00] psychologist, and author of several internationally best-selling books. Her popular weekly podcast on emotional healing and spiritual awakening is downloaded 3 million times a month. Tara is founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, has been active in bringing meditation into schools, prisons, and underserved populations. Together with Jack Kornfield, she's co-founded the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program, which serves participants from 74 countries around the world.
Today, we're discussing her bestseller, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, recently released in a 20th anniversary updated edition.
Welcome, Tara!
Tara
Nice to be with you, Lee.
Lee
It's nice to be with you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long while, so I'm grateful that we get to spend a bit of time together today.
Congratulations on 20 year anniversary of your book, Radical Acceptance!
Tara
I know. It ages me, and it's hard to believe. But yeah, thank you.
Lee
It [00:05:00] seems that it has served and helped many, many millions of people. So I'm grateful for your good work.
I love the introduction or the inscription on Chapter 1, "The Trance of Unworthiness," with this passage from Wendell Berry that says: "You'll be walking some night / It will be clear to you suddenly / that you were about to escape, / and that you are guilty: you misread / the complex instructions, you are not / a member, you lost your card / or never had one."
Classic Wendell Berry, getting right to the point there. But unpack kind of some of that feeling for us of this trance of unworthiness.
Tara
Yeah. Well, first, it's pervasive. And I call it a trance because, if I was to say to you, okay, Lee, do you think you judge yourself too much? You'd probably go, yeah. And, you know, I do hand raises. Most people know they do.
But what we don't realize is how [00:06:00] many moments, on some level, there's this unconscious monitoring, like, how am I doing now? And we have a standard, and we're falling short. I mean, I can sense it even in myself this moment, just as we're talking, that there's some part of me saying, you know, am I being natural and authentic and am I tuned in and, you know... So, we monitor, we feel we're falling short. And on some level, there's a sense of not okay with ourselves.
We, we get to where we turn, we turn on ourselves.
Lee
I certainly, I've made a lot of progress with that, but I think it was debilitating to me when I was younger. And a sort of deep perfectionism that was certainly fueled for me, at least in part, if not a really large part, by kind of religious perfectionism of the community in which I was raised.
But as well, a kind of more general perfectionism, I think, [00:07:00] that has, was often debilitating. Is this for you as well?
Tara
That's exactly, that's what got me going. I mean, I realized, and this was when I was in college, it really became conscious.
I remember being on a hike with a friend and she was saying, you know, I learned to be my own best friend. And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, I'm the farthest thing. I was the harshest critic-- you know, my, my body weighed too much and I wasn't, you know, my way of doing relationships was off, and I wasn't a good daughter, and this and that, not contributing enough.
So, I realized how wall to wall it was. And that, when you say crippling... when we don't see it, that sense of unworthiness really makes it impossible to be intimate with others because we have that sense of, 'if they really knew.'
I think of one woman who was sharing being with her mom when her mom was [00:08:00] dying, and she was in a coma, and when... at one point, she kind of opened her eyes and looked really lucidly at my friend and said, "All my life I thought something was wrong with me." And then she closed her eyes and she, she died. And those were-- so those were her last words.
And for my friend and for me, just listening, it just seemed like such a, a tragedy, that we can go through decades and on some level feel like we're not okay.
Lee
Yeah. That reminds me of a episode when I was probably in my early 30s, and at the time I was a staff member at a church and I was preaching fairly regularly. And one of the interesting tasks that we would do is that as the staff at the church would kind of read through the text that I was supposed to preach that week.
And there's this beautiful text in the New Testament, out of [00:09:00] 1 John, and it has this passage about whenever our hearts condemn us, God knows everything and doesn't condemn us. Something to that effect. And when it got around in the circle to me, to kind of give my response to that text, I said something like, "I have no idea what it would be like for my heart not to condemn me."
And there was a friend of mine who was on the staff, an older man, who I love, and he turned and he said, in a very non-shaming way, he said, "Lee, where do you think that's coming from?" He said, " I don't think it's coming from us. Where do you think it's coming from?"
And, uh, that actually led to my resignation from that post, because I realized I really needed to deal with that.
Tara
Wow. That's powerful. Just to sense how much it impacts your whole life.
Lee
Tara
Lee
Well, you, you, you started pointing to it there, but you say, further [00:10:00] on in the chapter: "The more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel." Unpack that for us a bit.
Tara
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I feel like our deepest longing is to belong. It's in our DNA.
We are pack creatures, we're social creatures. And so, feeling that we're enough, feeling that we're deserving, then we sense we belong and we can relax. When there's a sense that there's something wrong with me, that we're flawed, hand in hand with that, because that's shame, is this fear that we're going to be pushed out of the, the group, out of the belonging. So we get really gripped by that fear of failing.
It really means a lot to fail. It's not okay to make a [00:11:00] mistake. It translates into, 'I'm going to be rejected and flung out into the cold.' And it's really interesting, because all of the defenses come out of that sense of, 'I'm separate, something's missing, something's wrong, I need something.' And what we do as humans, is we go from that sense of, 'life is dangerous, something's wrong,' to, 'I'm wrong.'
We take it personally. That is the way the ego is structured. If there are a lot of hurdles to feel a sense of belonging to our family, to the earth, to the community, then we're gonna, it's gonna in some way be a reflection to us that something's wrong with me.
And in our culture, there are so many different hierarchies that give the message to some, 'you are less than,' whether it's racial, or by class, or by religion, [00:12:00] whatever, that many, many people get the message from our society of that sense of flawedness.
Lee
So then, your book is structured around this fundamental claim that the way out, or-- let me just read this one passage: "The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives."
So, that's a-- I'm sure a lot of people are going to receive that as quite objectionable. But unpack that and make the case for it for us.
Tara
Sure. Well, I think, right away I think of Carl Rogers, famous American psychologist, who said, "It wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was, that I was free to change."
And the reason I like that so much, Lee, is that it, it says, basically, that on some deep level, making friends [00:13:00] with or being at peace with how we are in the moment... like, how this life is expressing right in this moment, is the precondition to transformation.
If we're at war with ourselves we're just seeding, in the soil of our psyche, more aversion, more shame, more guilt. So if we want to be able to emerge and evolve, in some way we have to make friends with the life that's here.
Another way of saying it is, we just have to stop being at war with reality, because we are as we are. And we have amazing potential to change some of the habits that cause ourselves or others harm, but we won't be able to access that if we're at war with ourselves.
I mean, I think of it like, we have to love ourselves into healing. It doesn't work for children, it doesn't work for anybody, to punish people into trying to bring out the best [00:14:00] of who they are.
And I saw with myself, because when I was in my twenties, I had an eating disorder and I had a huge shame around it. And so I, I kept being very punishing towards how I was eating, and, and how I was experiencing myself.
And I finally got to this place that I realized that I had to sense where the pain was and really hold it with kindness, you know, that the drivenness, that, that sense of not being able to tolerate being with the rawness of my experience without self-soothing with food. I had to hold that with enormous compassion. And that somehow or other relaxed my nervous system so I could start making new choices. And that's just one example. I mean, I've held all sorts of things against myself and realized that that wasn't going [00:15:00] to bring out a positive change.
Lee
Yeah, on your definition of radical acceptance, you said it has two parts: seeing clearly, and holding our experience with compassion.
And you kind of started to get at that, but would you tell us a little bit more about both of those two parts of, of acceptance?
Tara
Yeah. So, it's described, I love the description of the two wings of the bird, and that anytime we want to wake up our awareness, wake up to who we can be, there are two wings in order to fly and be free.
And one wing is the wing of what's sometimes called mindfulness, which is seeing clearly what's happening in the moment. And the question that you can ask yourself to have that wing wake up is, 'what is happening inside me right now?' It's just a really simple, powerful inquiry. What is happening [00:16:00] inside me right now?
The other wing is the wing of compassion, which says, whatever we're seeing, can we hold it with some tenderness, some grace, some space, some kindness? So that wing, the question is, 'and can I be with this?' Or, 'can I let this be?'
And I'll share just, a story that really helped me attune to the two wings was, I was teaching at a, like a two week silent retreat, and we do interviews with the people who are there.
And one of the men that I was doing interviews with was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And he was a clinical psychologist and he had been practicing meditation for a decade, just to give a little background. And then he told me about, you know, some months back he had been giving a talk to about a hundred people... [00:17:00] and he started and then he went completely blank. Like, he didn't know why he was there, who they were.
So here's what he did. First, he actually paused. I call it the sacred art of pausing, because we cannot enter the next moment fresh if we don't pause. So he paused. And then he started naming what he was aware of.
And he would say, um, "heart pounding." And then he'd put his palms together and bow. And then he would say, "afraid." Palms together, bow. "Ashamed." Palms together, bow. "Confused." And it kept going, and then then he said, "relaxing." Bow.
He looked at the group, and he apologized. And one person said to him, you know, and [00:18:00] they had tears in their eyes, "No one has ever taught us this way."
And what had he done, you know? He had basically... those are the two wings. He had named what was happening, just naming experience. And then the other wing, letting it be with a sense of honoring. This is reality in this moment. And that created the circumstance for him to calm down, for him to be in relationship with others.
The two wings have transformational magic. They bring us into the power of presence. And sometimes it takes time, because we have all sorts of distractions in our mind, and so on, to simply notice what's happening in the moment and open our hearts to it.
Lee
That's a beautiful, beautiful story. Thank you for that.[00:19:00]
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Tara Brach.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
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Coming up, Tara and I discuss the sacred art of pausing, the difference between pain and suffering, and learning to deal mindfully with fear and anxiety.[00:20:00]
You mentioned this notion of pausing, as [unknown] would call it, a meta habit, that I see you pointing to. And, I think, even though I've worked at that through the years, I realize how poorly I can fall back into forgetting to pause.
And my own work, right now, I'm in a season of very intense work, and so I'm seeing my anxiety tick back up. And just this week, having been reminded by your work to pause, it's amazing to begin to become aware of how much tension I have in my chest, how I crunch my shoulders over. And just to not even be aware of that kind of physical reality until I pause and pay attention to it. And as you say, then the pause allows me to make different choices about setting my shoulders [00:21:00] back, breathing into my chest, you know? And so, it's just, it's fascinating how much good can come from simply pausing.
Tara
Thank you for that. You just helped me to put my shoulders back, and I just started breathing more deeply. That was a very good induction. I appreciate that, Lee.
It's magic. I mean, that's why I call it the sacred pause, because, you know, our lives are such a kind of tumbling into the future, and it's driven by fear. It's the survival brain. So part of the reason we don't pause is we start getting in touch with that clenching that's going on inside, a mental clenching and physical clenching, and it, the first expression of it is, it's unpleasant. But if we even pause for a minute, just even pause and take five long deep breaths, it entirely changes our physiological [00:22:00] state.
It's really magic.
Lee
Yes, it is. It is. It's fascinating.
Would you discuss... I think the distinction you draw is between pain and suffering. I understand that it's inevitable that we're going to have some sort of pain. And then there's the sort of mental story we tell ourselves or obsess about about that pain. And that awareness of that distinction can alleviate a lot of the turmoil that we experience about our inevitable pain. Is that accurate?
Tara
Yeah, that is. I mean, the phrase is, is that, you know, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
And where it comes from is pain, meaning unpleasant, unpleasantness is just part of the human nervous system's experience. Like, it's just going to keep [00:23:00] happening.
And we're storytelling creatures. And the more we wrap what's going on with an interpretation or a narrative, the more we end up locking in.
So, I think it was Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist, who described, you know, left to its own devices, there's, you know, very short duration for emotions to come and go, like the weather. But what locks something like fear into mood, what locks disappointment into depression is, you know, the ongoing mental narrative. And so if we can learn to have an experience, and instead of going off into all of our beliefs and thoughts about it, coming directly in contact with the sensations, what's going on in our body, it'll come and go.
A practice I often [00:24:00] use is called the RAIN meditation. And it's an acronym, Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And I've had more people tell me that the RAIN meditation saved their life, when they were caught in fear, shame, or anger, whatever it was, conflict with people, than any other practice.
And again, this is something, you know, people from all faiths, from all different traditions and so on. Um, and the reason is because, again, it is activating our evolved brain, really. It activates mindfulness and compassion.
So, my mother died when she was 86. When she was about 82, she moved down here. I was at a time of high level demand of finishing chapters in a book and a lot of teaching, traveling. And I [00:25:00] adore my mom, and I was glad to have her move down with us. And I really was struggling, because I was so busy and I didn't want to let her down.
And I remember... I was feeling guilty in terms of her, but I was also very, very anxious about having things really go south on a lot of levels. So, I remember once I was in here, where I am right now, um, and I was putting together a talk I had to give that night on loving kindness. My mother walked into the room. She wanted to show me a, an article. And I was so fixated on the screen I didn't even turn my head. She just very graciously put down the article and walked out, but I looked and saw her retreating figure, and I said, oh my gosh, I don't know how long I'm going to have her. And so I paused. I'm so thankful that I-- the sacred pause, and I did RAIN.
The R is recognize, it begins that wing of mindfulness. [00:26:00] Okay, what's happening here? Anxiety, guilt. The A of RAIN is allow, which says, it's here right now. You know, just not to argue with reality, it's, this is like a wave in the ocean, you know, it belongs. And I often say for the A of RAIN, "this belongs." The I is investigate. And investigate is primarily somatic, meaning, "what's going on in this living body?" But it can start with, "what am I believing?" because we have this narrative always.
So, what I was believing was, I'm going to fail. You know, I'm going to fail my mother, I'm going to fail my students, because I'm not going to be done on time, I'm going to-- you know, I'm going to fail myself for not finishing this chapter.
It was a real fear of failure. And that was, you know, very core anxiety. And underneath that, I'm going to fail and be rejected and, [00:27:00] you know, life's going to end. It was really, it was deep. So, I then continued to investigate, because, this is the key thing, it has to be somatic. Because if we don't really feel it in our bodies, we can't really open to a larger space. So I could feel this clenching in my chest. And my, my gut, you know, is this kind of aching, empty feeling in my gut.
And I, I put my hand on my heart, because that's the beginning of the N of RAIN, which is nurturing. And I just asked myself, so what is-- asked this place in me, "what do you really need, what do you need to trust or feel or--" you know, because the beginning of nurturing is to sense what's needed here.
And what was really needed was that I, I just trust my love, trust my goodness, trust that, you know, what was in me, my, my heart, my spirit, was going to... [00:28:00] you know, it would be fine. It'd be imperfect, but fine, you know.
So, the fullness of nurturing is just to send that caring message inward, which is what I did, you know, kind of trust the goodness, trust the goodness.
And I could feel my-- I could, I'm feeling it right now. I could feel the space open up. And it was like, in the moments of just seeing what was happening and offering kindness, there was more of a sense of openness and spaciousness and clarity and tenderness. It was like I was back home in my own soul, you know? I was resting in the truth of who I was, more true than that busy, hurried, anxious, guilty self, which is, by the way, the gift of RAIN.
Lee
Thank you for that. So RAIN. Recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture.
Tara
[00:29:00] That's it.
And then, what I call 'after the rain' is, just like after a real rain, that's when everything kind of flowers. After we've done those steps, to then just start to notice a larger truth about who we are. That there is more awareness, there's more light, there's more space, there's more tenderness than when we were identified with that smaller self.
Lee
In thinking about our response to fear, you have a quote from Charlotte Beck at the opening of your chapter on fear. Says, "We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us." And that reminded me of another episode in in my own life.
Probably a decade ago, I had one particular fear that I was [00:30:00] just having a very difficult time facing.
And a friend of mine in a group that I'm in, one day said something like, he said, "You know, if you're at the, at the beach and you're in the ocean, and the waves are coming in, and they're strong waves..." Said, "if you turn to the side or you turn your back on it, is much more likely to get knocked down. And it's a little easier to get through if you'll just dive right into the wave and let it flow over you."
And I found that so helpful. And I hear you saying a similar sort of thing, of it's, it's actually letting ourselves experience it, and then see what it might teach us or what we might learn through allowing ourselves to be in that.
Tara
Yeah, thank you for that metaphor. That's a powerful one.
You know, if you, with a wave, if you actually try to get away from it, it really crashes on you and you get rolled. But if you dive in, it's fine.
And... this is, you know, what we [00:31:00] resist persists. And what we can open to, we become the openness, the space that it can move through. It really is weather. But it takes training to do that.
And the challenge is, sometimes fear is too strong. Sometimes it's traumatic fear, and trying to dive into the wave doesn't work, because if it's traumatic fear we can get overwhelmed. So it takes some discernment if it's going to be too much. Instead of diving into the wave, we need to resource ourselves, we need to get buoys, we need to have, you know, safety anchors, something.
And that's more what I was talking about earlier. We need to learn to ground ourselves. But if the fear isn't too overwhelming, the healing comes from being with what's here.
And I know for myself, one of the times I was most frightened, I was in a [00:32:00] hospital. I went through about six years of a kind of spiraling downhill of illness, and really didn't know what was going on. I'm much better now. But I was losing my mobility, I couldn't-- I mean, before that I was very, completely fanatic about exercise and sports and everything. I was just losing all these capacities.
So I was in a hospital unit for cardiacs. They were wondering if it was something with my heart. And I remember being alone-- you know how it is, it's an endless day in a hospital, the lights never go out. And I started getting very fearful one night, started thinking-- because I had no idea what was wrong, and thinking of all the different things coming up that I might have to cancel, and that I probably would have to cancel.
And so, I remembered a teaching that's just what we're talking about, Lee, which is to meet your [00:33:00] edge and soften.
I said, okay, with this fear I'm going to, I'm going to meet my edge and soften. And I, I kept opening to it, and it was, you know, it was very raw in my body and very, very unpleasant, and I kept saying, "meet your edge and soften, soften, open, soften, let it be there, let it be there," and the fear transformed into grief.
It's like under the fear was the grief of losing life. Because, you know, our fear of what's ahead is that we're going to lose life in some way. Somebody we love, something we value, there's going to be loss. So I was opening right into the grief about that loss. And then again, meet your edge and soften, like, let it be there. Open, open.
And something collapsed, and I just was... it just became this [00:34:00] field of poignant tenderness, that the grief itself, that embedded in the grief was just this love for life.
And I could just feel this love for life. It was a very timeless kind of love. It wasn't holding on to a particular thing, like I want to be able to do this event. It was just loving life. It felt very vast and very timeless.
And that space made it possible-- I kept, for the rest of the time I was in the hospital and afterwards, every time I'd do that process of meeting my edge and softening, and really opening to the fear, I could feel behind it that grief and that love, and I really found that there was a very alive, spacious field that had room for the changing weather.
So, [00:35:00] through my life I've been deepening that process of going right into the wave in that way. It's the same idea. Meet your edge and soften.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode with Tara Brach. If you missed a portion of this interview or would like to have access to the complete unabridged version, which I especially endorse in the case of this interview with Tara, you can follow our podcast wherever you listen.
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, more on fear and anxiety, dealing with addiction and suppressed desire, and more.
Another counterintuitive approach that you take is in your chapter on desire, and that rather than meeting desire with aversion or suppression, as [00:36:00] is often the case, you're suggesting that, again, we interrogate it, and/or we discover what's underneath the desire that actually may lead us to a greater freedom.
Matter of fact, another one of the great quotes that I love from your book, from D. H. Lawrence: "Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving."
Would you unpack this notion of desire for us?
Tara
Yeah. There are so many, and this comes from many religions, the sense that, that humans are evil and that our desire is getting us in trouble and we've got to have all our antennas up and our shields up and so on to watch out.
And, my experience is that every emotion we [00:37:00] have is intelligent, and that the basic energies of our emotions, including passions, are a life loving life. They come from love.
They get distorted and confused and cause trouble but they come from love. And desire comes from love, it's a love of life. Now, there's no question that it can turn into addiction and be destructive. So, clearly there has to be mindfulness. But I find, what is so powerful is what I call tracing back to the core of the energy.
So if I'm having desire for something, and I, instead of thinking of the object, whether it's food or another person or success in something or whatever, I make what I call the U-turn and I go right back into the feeling of the desire. And I ask the question, what is it I am really wanting? What am I really longing for, you know, [00:38:00] what is it my heart's really longing for?
What I find is that I'm longing for love, I'm longing to be one with love, whether we call that one with God, one with spirit, one with the universe, I'm longing for that belonging. And then, if I keep going in and in, I actually come to the experience of that belonging. It's as John O'Donohue put it so beautifully, he said, "Prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging."
And the more we go in and in and in, the more it's really love calling us home. But it gets mistaken as desire for an object out there. And so, what I like to teach, in terms of bringing more awareness, is to just sense right into the heart of the desire: what are we really longing for?
And it takes some time, it takes some digging, as D. H. Lawrence said, [00:39:00] because we are so habituated to thinking that what we want is the recognition, or what we want is that person out there, whereas what we really want is an experience. It's an experience of communion.
Lee
Beautifully said.
Yeah, I think in the Christian tradition, there's this sort of, on the one hand, a moralistic fear of desire, fear of pleasure.
And then, what I find much more helpful is in the kind of virtue traditions, going back to somebody like Aquinas, or going back to Augustine, or going back to even Aristotle, is this sort of notion that a virtue like temperance, for example, is not about squelching pleasure. It's about enjoying pleasure all the more.
And that you can fall prey to [00:40:00] one of two vices with regard to pleasure. You can fall prey to abstemiousness and fear of pleasure, or this overindulgence that can lead to bondage and addiction. But there's this sweet spot where it's trying to help us realize how beautiful and wonderful and pleasurable life and love and relationships and the body is and can be. And I see, I, I hear you saying a very similar thing.
Tara
It is. This is-- and I, and part of what I'm enjoying in talking to you is that this is the wisdom, the common wisdom of different traditions, the perennial philosophy really. I mean, the Buddhists would call it the middle way that not to, not to grasp and not to push away.
And what that takes is presence. So if we can train ourselves in that wise abstinence, you know, where we're not grasping after but we're creating space, or William Blake would say, you know, to not try to [00:41:00] grasp at the joy as it flies by, this open handedness... that, that enjoys it in the moment and then lets it go.
Lee
I learned the phrase, I guess, from Pema Chodron, and from her book, I think it was called, uh, When Things Fall Apart... and she talks about in meditation to neither repress nor indulge, I think is her phrase.
Tara
Yes. It's beautiful. She's wonderful. Yeah.
Lee
Yeah. That was so super helpful. And that, that kind of process of meditating - desire, fear, whatever can come along, and I don't have to jump on the boat, but I can observe the boat, and I don't have to have aversion towards the boat as it flows down the stream of my consciousness. So, yeah.
Tara
Yes, and it really, it's such an invitation, because so many of us-- if we're grasping, we're not really enjoying life. If we're pushing away, we're not enjoying life.
And joy is such a capacity that we don't nurture, and the joy comes from that [00:42:00] open handedness.
Lee
That reminds me of another thing I learned from Pema Chodron, which I think is a widespread Buddhist practice, meditation practice of tonglen. Would you describe that for us?
Tara
Yeah. So, if our habitual conditioning out of fear is when we encounter pain to push it away and when we feel a moment of pleasure or something good to grasp on, tonglen deconditions it.
Tonglen is a compassion practice that helps us feel our connection with all beings. So, the way we would practice is in a moment that you bring to mind something that is really difficult and painful. Let's say many people right now are feeling kind of the horror of the violence that's going on in the Middle East right now.
It uses the breath as a way to, to activate our [00:43:00] capacities. When you breathe in, you actually make yourself available to that suffering, you let yourself be touched by the suffering. You imagine it and you breathe in and feel like that pain is actually being felt in your body. So, it reverses the sense of keeping away and ignoring and avoiding and so on.
And then with the out breath, you feel your deepest wish for freedom, for healing from suffering, for relief, and you send it out. So it's a taking in and a sending out.
And the fear that people have, is they're going to take in and be overwhelmed. That's the fear. If we think we're an individual separate self, that's a totally understandable fear, but what happens when you start breathing in [00:44:00] and and letting out is that you start feeling that you are the tender space that the world's happening in, there's plenty of room for it.
And it creates a sense of profound connection with all beings, so it's not their suffering over there. It's our suffering. It's our shared suffering. And that's a profound waking up, because we tend to move through life as, you know, kind of cocoon.
Lee
Tara
Yeah. I'll give you another example that's... you know, the way that these compassion practices actually really connect us with each other.
I first saw this in a documentary Van Jones was involved with, where he brought together two groups of people.
And one group were, uh, from West Virginia. And they were struggling with the opiate epidemic and all professionals serving, trying to help. [00:45:00] And the other group was from South L. A. and they were struggling with heroin and drug epidemics out there. And he brought together these two groups. These were very culturally different groups.
Here, you got these two groups, for a week, being together and, you know, exploring the epidemics that they were both dealing with and getting to know each other. And, of course, at first there was a lot of mistrust and there was a lot of sense of separateness.
And I'm sharing this because our society is so completely caught in, in division.
So there they were. They're there for a week. And he asked them to each bring a picture of someone they had lost in the epidemics. And at one point during this documentary, you see one man holding a picture of his son, and he said, "The last thing I [00:46:00] told him was, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out."
And you could feel the whole group-- it's like you could see that, like, as with the tonglen practice, it was no longer my suffering, it's our shared suffering. And how realizing that created this really precious, I think, sacred space, because it becomes sacred space when we see the truth of our communion, of our belonging to each other.
And you could see that there. So we need these practices that help us to see more truthfully each other.
Lee
I've been talking to Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, recently released in a 20th anniversary updated edition.
Tara, it's been lovely talking to you today. [00:47:00] Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation.
Tara
A lot of appreciation for what you do, Lee. Thank you.
Lee
Thank you.
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Tara Brach, mindfulness meditation teacher and author of numerous best-selling books, including Radical Acceptance, which was just released in a 20th anniversary edition.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that [00:48:00] makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.