Chapter 1: What are the primary expressions of an awake heart explored in this episode?
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, my friends.
These last few weeks we've been doing a course called the Brahma-viharas, which is the divine abodes, and it really goes through the basic heart spaces that are expressions of our true nature that we can awaken intentionally. And to begin, this is the third in the series, and you didn't have to listen to the first two, but they're available to you.
To begin this one, a story that I love that takes place in a monastery, many of these classic teaching stories do, and in this one a novice has just joined the monastery and he's assigned to help the other monks who are copying the canons and the laws of the church by hand. but he notices that they're copying off of copies.
And he's worried about this because he thinks, you know, there could be a mistake and then they just keep going with the mistake. So he goes to the abbot and describes his concerns and the abbot says, well, we've been doing this for centuries, my son, but you make a good point.
So he goes down deep, deep, deep into the vaults and the cave underneath the monastery where the original manuscript has been saved and He's gone for hours and the novice begins to get worried about him. So he goes after him and he sees the old abbot crying uncontrollably and banging his head against the wall. And in a choking voice, you know, the young man says, well, what's wrong, father?
And in a choking voice he says, the word was celebrate.
Laughter
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Chapter 2: How does the 'if-only' mindset block our experience of joy?
More the time there's a sense of a a stressed person trying to get somewhere else, you know, trying to get through the day. Can you relate to that? At least I notice that. So I read you another favorite and this is a poem by the poet Hafez. What is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint?
The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with the divine and that the beloved has made such a fantastic move that the saint now is continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender. Whereas, my dear, I'm afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves. A thousand serious moves.
So there's something in us that kind of knows that we get grim and we are kind of leaning forward looking at what is going to go wrong or what's challenging. It's that thing of life being a problem to solve, you know, rather than a mystery to be lived, that kind of a mindset. And so we get back to Andre Gide with the word obligation. How could joy be an obligation?
And my understanding of the word obligation is in the same way that we feel a commitment to really manifesting our full potential. That just as it's part of our full potential to really open to the suffering of the world and feel that kind of tenderness so that we can respond and be part of our world,
it's also part of our commitment to wholeness to open in a way that allows us to feel our love for life. Mary Oliver puts it this way, she says, My work is loving the world, My work is Loving the World. They'll read a little bit more. She says, am I no longer young and still not half perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished, which is mostly rejoicing since all ingredients are here. Some years back, one friend in our community here shared a conversation she and another woman had had.
They were in a cancer support group together, both had gone through pretty serious, you know, they were survivors, but very scary season of life. And her friend had asked her, What would it be like for you to think that something good was going to happen rather than something bad was going to happen? Like something good is going to happen tonight or tomorrow. What would it be like to think that?"
And my friend said, totally weird, you know, because it just wasn't her habit. And then her friend said, good, now try it. She said, take a moment and let's try it together. So we're pausing together and sensing, okay, today or tonight or tomorrow or these next days there is something very enriching or enlivening that's possible, that can happen. What happens when you adopt that?
Nothing good is going to happen. Feel your body, feel your heart. Maybe there is resistance, maybe there is excitement. The intention here is not to create expectation which is always binding, but rather to create openness to the infinite possibility that really is a part of reality, to be available
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Chapter 3: What practices can help us cultivate joy in our lives?
If you think about what you thought about today, what were the main thoughts going through your mind? Whatever you are thinking creates a certain biochemistry in the body. And then that biochemistry then creates more of the looping of the thoughts. So we sustain a happiness set point because of the kind of things we think about and pay attention to.
And if we are honest, a lot of our thinking has to do with planning and worrying and judging, you know. A lot of our thinking is something is wrong or something is missing on some level.
And so we start noticing how we keep thinking, well, I want this and this, if I can just get this project done and then I can speak for myself, something gets completed and it's no time, I thought that would make me feel better before I'm fixated on the next thing. Man on a California beach is praying to God, Lord grant me one wish.
The sky darkens and there's the booming voice, you've lived a good life, I'll grant you a wish. And so he says, please Lord build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over whenever I want and see the beauty and alleviate stress. And the Lord says, well that's pretty materialistic and plus it's a huge endeavor to get all the steel and the concrete and
taking your time and coming up with another wish that's a little more, you know, something that's more from the heart. So the man's kind of pondering this and he goes, okay, I've got it. I wish I could understand women and know what really, really makes them happy. After a few moments, God says, you want two lanes on that highway or four?
The deeper question is understanding happiness itself and really what changes that set point, you know, what allows us to get out of our habits of thinking and our habits of planning and worrying and judging, something is wrong, something is missing, and come into presence so we can be available to what's possible. So what changes the set point is grounded in presence.
And it's sometimes described as unconditional presence, the moments that we're unconditionally present, that we open. Anthony de Mello puts it this way, he says, when there's absolute cooperation with the inevitable, okay? We just open to how it is. I like Dorothy Hunt saying, the heart-space where everything that is is welcome.
It's that openness to life that we are training in when we practice mindful awareness. We are training to have things arise inside us and rather than pushing them away or grasping on, just being with moment to moment. That is the power of the training. Now I just want to pause here and say,
Unconditional presence doesn't mean that we don't seek the partner of our dreams or the job of our dreams or any of our if-onlys. We still are going to go for what we want. What it means – and this is really key – is that we have the capacity to be fully here, that our life isn't dependent on things being a certain way.
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