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Chapter 1: What is the essence of compassion in our lives?
Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brach Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrach.com, where you can also join our email list.
Now, let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste.
Namaste and welcome.
So I'd like to wish you a happy Valentine's Day and begin with a brief quiz. The first one is, what do squirrels give each other on Valentine's Day? Any guesses? Forget-me-nots. Okay, one more, only one more. What does an octopus sing to his beloved on Valentine's Day? I want to hold your hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand. Okay. I gave it a good shot, right?
So appropriately we are in the midst of a four-part series on awakening the present heart. And this is the first one. The first one that we did was on awakening loving-kindness, which is the seeing the goodness and responding to the goodness in life. The second is compassion, which is what we'll be doing this class, and then we move on to joy and equanimity.
And in the Buddhist tradition these four are called the Brahma-viharas or the divine abodes because they really express the capacity and potential of our awakening heart. So in thinking about each one of them we look at, you know, really what's blocking this innate capacity we have and what cultivates it.
So as we think of compassion tonight, I'd like to invite you to bring to mind someone you know, or if you don't know anyone, someone you know of, who you really consider as authentically compassionate. And just take a moment to sense that person and what are the qualities that come to mind? What is it that you feel in them? What lets you know that quality of heart is there?
See if this description from Henri Nouwen resonates. He says, when we honestly ask ourselves which person our lives mean the most to us, we often find it's those who instead of giving advice, solutions or cures have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, not fixing, and face us with the reality of our powerlessness is a friend who cares." So we begin to sense, so what does it really mean to be compassionate? I'd like to name three qualities and the first one
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Chapter 2: How does evolutionary conditioning affect our capacity for compassion?
they were trying to get them to mate. And the male, of course, didn't need much encouragement. He was going at it. But this female on the chain was whimpering and scared and so on and trying to avoid his advances. So Fran Peavy describes this wave of caring that went through her. And then something happened she'd never forget.
She said, suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain out of the male's grasp and to my amazement she walked through the crowd straight over to me and took my hand. Then she led me across the circle to the only other two women in the crowd and she joined hands with one of them. The three of us stood together in a circle. I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine.
The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own women's support group." It's the beginning of Me Too. So, but the question that I think is really interesting is what prevented the male onlookers to feel the compassion at that moment. I mean, here's this female on a chain and upset.
In those moments there was an override, a limbic override, there was a forgetting that came from the less evolved part of the psyche because they were seeking excitement, seeking engagement, it was a male bonding kind of thing, affiliation, dominance, and that masked the suffering in a fellow being, it reinforced the much older conditioning of us versus them. Does that make sense?
Just for those moments. It's a trance, and it's a trance that happens to all of us when we're stressed, every one of us. So this isn't about women being empathetic. Women tend to be because they're more biologically relational, but this is not a male versus female. We all go into trance, every one of us, when we're stressed, and it closes off our hearts. This is the way Einstein puts it.
He says we have an optical delusion of separation when this happens. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
This optical delusion of separation when we are being run by our more primitive parts of our brain. So what I would like to do is look more closely so we can in our lives catch on to, oh, okay, this is trance, I am not fully here. So we can wake up to it and just see where we get blocked and we get blocked when we we have unmet needs and in some way they get tripped off.
And the first major area we close down our compassion is when we feel in some way endangered, right? There are so many ways that if we feel threatened we are going to in some way fail or our health is going down or we are going to lose esteem or lose possessions or money or whatever, as soon as that happens that survival brain kicks in and we become less attuned. Now the major
major one for most of us is when we are afraid of failure. I think about that a lot that there is a sense of how often we are anxiously preparing for something so we don't fail, how often we are trying to get to an appointment on time or trying to make sure our children or our partner is taken care of, whatever it is, but there is that stress and there is a deep fear there is not enough time.
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Chapter 3: What common blocks hinder our ability to feel compassion?
He said, I don't know why people like me so much. It must be because I value bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is the awakened heart-mind. She says, I can't claim to practice it, but I value it. What he is saying, in my understanding, because clearly he practices and he emanates it, but he means that it's not across the board, he forgets to, but he is saying, I care about caring. That's why people like me.
And I heard this quote a long time ago, and it was one of those quotes that has just stayed with me because I can really relate to that. Clearly, I'm not always sitting with this wide-open, tender, inclusive heart, but I care about the awakened heart.
And that caring keeps drawing us, even though we go into trance and get the limbic hijack and all that, we keep on evolving because we care about caring. And you wouldn't be here, each one of you that's listening, unless there was something waking up in you and knowing that caring, that this is what matters.
it gives us motivation when we sense that's where we're going, we're evolving towards that awakened heart-mind and that matters to us. Because then we can begin to notice without slamming ourselves, oh, okay, I've been entranced but I care about caring. That was a bit of what happened for one woman who describes an experience with her mother I want to share with you.
She was very dedicated in noticing and witnessing when she went under the line, you know, when she went into trance. And she describes being with her mother when her mom told her about having breast cancer. And she said, you know, immediately she went into sadness, guilt, anger, future-tripping regret. In other words, she was overwhelmed by the shock. Okay, so this is stress.
She says, as it usually does, my mind immediately went into planning mode. So just track the story. So instead of like, oh, you know, the resonance, she's right there planning. That's a stress reaction. What needs to happen? What are your treatment options? How soon we can get the lump removed? So you get the idea.
And she says, thank God for this work because this work meaning training in mindfulness, noticing going into trance, because despite of a complete head spiral I still had the presence enough to ask myself an important question. What am I noticing now? And in that moment I was able to see something I would have missed otherwise. My mother didn't want to talk about any of those things.
As I was weighing her options she sat in the high-top chair in my kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake and mine but suddenly it became clear that wasn't what she needed. She was scared and needed to be scared.
I debated whether to give her a hug which sounds terrible I know but I was barely holding it together and scurrying around making dinner, pouring over a doctor's paperwork and staying busy was my way of avoiding total collapse. Being present allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room, and wrapped my arms around her.
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Chapter 4: Why is self-compassion essential for nurturing compassion towards others?
And the first is that, you know, when we witness vulnerability to really feel it and let ourselves be touched. And when the tenderness comes, when the real visceral tenderness comes, feel it for fifteen seconds, twenty seconds, but let yourself marinate in the feeling of tenderness. We don't pause.
Let yourself really feel it and then in some way extend, whether it's through prayer or action, but extend. Because the completion of compassion is some extension of our being. The site that's correlated with compassion in the brain is right near the motor cortex. We are meant to reach out and help. It's very interesting. So let's look at those.
The first step is to begin to see that there is suffering or vulnerability. We don't usually see. When we are in our stress trance we don't look at each other and go, oh, look, you are having a hard time. We typically don't see very deeply. What stops us?
Well, either we are living and stereotyping people, a certain type, in which case we are just seeing the type but we are not seeing behind the mask, or else somebody is acting out in a way and we are seeing the way they are defensive or aggressive but we are not seeing what is behind it. We are not seeing how it is covering vulnerability.
James Baldwin says, I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone they will be forced to deal with their own pain. Now, when we run into someone who is acting hateful, do we look deeply enough to sense, oh, there is pain behind that hate? Most of us don't. We recoil. Do you know what I mean?
So it takes a commitment to really look and see what's going on. And then if we look we'll feel tenderness and then we can extend ourselves in some way that is meaningful in that moment. One of the examples I love of this, of really the expression of compassion.
I heard in a Krista Tippett interview with Ruby Sales and Ruby Sales is an African-American social activist, older woman now, very active in civil rights. So here is what she says. She describes getting her locks washed and she says, My locker's daughter came in one morning and she had been hustling all night. and she had sores on her body and she was just in a state drug.
So something said to me, ask her, where does it hurt? And I said, Shelley, where does it hurt? And just that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother. And she talked about having been incested. She talked about all the things that had happened to her as a child. And she literally shared the source of her pain.
And I realized in that moment, listening to her and talking with her, that I needed a larger way to do this work. What Ruby Sales is talking about in a larger way is cultivating this capacity to see the vulnerability, let ourselves be touched, and reach out. Where does it hurt? Where does it hurt? Such a beautiful question.
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