The Courage to Choose Love

Tara Brach: So our task as awakening beings, as bodhisattvas, 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 grieving and underneath that to love. And then, from that space, we have the imagination and the energy and the hope and courage to create a better future.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen and you just heard Tara Brach. 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 Workbook: 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, and 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 conversation with Tara Brach.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with meditation teacher Tara Brach. Hi Tara. It’s great to be with you.

Tara Brach: Hey, James. Good to be back talking.

James Shaheen: So Tara, we’re here to talk about your new book, The Courageous Heart Workbook: 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?

Tara Brach: Yeah. Well, it’s the perilous times we’re 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 shadow dark age as kind of an experience. And so the big inquiry I found for so many was, 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 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.

James Shaheen: 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.

Tara Brach: Yeah. Well, again, the context for that question is these times have huge amounts of suffering, and it’s in the conditioning, 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, and to keep on choosing love in response to what’s going on.

I can say for myself that 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. 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 remembering 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.

James Shaheen: You know, Tara, 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 tell us about that very interesting definition?

Tara Brach: 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 this is more now, I would say in these last few years than ever before, in earlier times, most of the questions and sharings were about people’s personal lives. And now it’s much more people being impacted by what’s going on in the world. So in a recent webinar, it was my neighbors and the terror of ICE descending upon them, or health insurance that I can’t afford anymore, or the continuing horror about the Middle East, or my family’s in Iran right now, 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. How many others are experiencing this? Because as soon as we sense that it’s not my personal fear or horror or whatever it is but this is in the collective, that we’re feeling not my fear but the fear, it’s 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. That gives us the courage to choose love.

By way of example, last month, there is each year a memorial that is held by several organizations that cohost it, an annual memorial that brings together Israeli and Palestinian families who’ve lost loved ones. So it was held a few weeks ago, and I’ve attended for several years and this time had the privilege of guiding part of a virtual event that followed with Valarie Kaur. During the memorial, these folks gather and speak the names, and they tell the stories and 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 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 that 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.

James Shaheen: You know, it is interesting that you talk about courage in this context because I sometimes think of it as the energy to continue to remain open, and listening to you talk about people grieving together, you mentioned the word “hope,” and maybe that inspiration is what would give us energy or being with others. I’m not sure, but people tend to burn out, shut down, and turn off everything around them.

Tara Brach: I think people burn out, shut down, and close off when they feel that they’re separate. If we think we’re on this bodhisattva path but we’re a separate self trying to save the world, good luck. It’s going to be a recipe for burnout. That’s why moving toward 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.

James Shaheen: I was thinking in reading through this book about how a collective approach generates energy, hope, togetherness, that we’re not alone, and you talk about the trance of separation. Can you say something about that?

Tara Brach: Well, it’s all of our predicament. I mean, every one of us has the architecture of the brain and the perception of separateness, and so that’s natural. We also have the capacity as we wake up to realize who we are beyond that separation. In a way, this is the core of the whole spiritual path: sensing the suffering that comes with feeling separate and that suffering wakes us up.

You know, it’s just so clear that 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 hearts, 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 an ocean with waves. And when the waves of feeling separate get really strong, if we open to them, we start discovering the ocean really does have room.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, I want to talk a little bit about fear because so many 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.

Tara Brach: 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 happens 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 who we are is not caught in the waves. There’s a bit of that ocean. It’s that larger perspective, and this is the heart of all the Buddhist practices, really. Our identity shifts the moment we can say “It’s like this.”

If we can extend that and sense that this belongs and say the words, “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 skill 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 RAIN so frequently is because the moments we most need mindfulness and compassion are the moments 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.” And then we deepen our attention to investigating, and investigating primarily somatically, where we’re actually feeling the fear and saying, “OK,” 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 to 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 that this hurts, then it’s possible, and I’m putting my hand on my heart right now, to nurture, which just simply means bring some tenderness ultimately to love the fear. In the moments that there’s a sense of fear, I actually invite myself to say, “Love this fear,” and 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 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 with the fear. But ultimately, getting intimate with fear and loving fear is a gateway to freedom.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting, because when I think of fear, I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. It’s so easy to slip into tribalism, which is such a big affliction right now, and to kind of lose your humanity in that. And you’re talking about interrupting that progression, is that right?

Tara Brach: That is exactly right. The biggest challenge of our times is what you’re pointing to, which is that unprocessed fear turns into aggression. That’s what’s going on. We are in a collective hijack right now globally, where it’s a time of existential threats, and we all know it. I mean, I could list them out. We know it. We know the Earth is threatened and there’s enormous instability on all levels. Every nervous system experiences it. We might not be consciously naming it that way, but if we’re sensitive, we know that we’re breathing in an atmosphere of fear. And when fear is not tended to, it turns into hatred and blame and aggression and indifference, numbness, dissociation. Joanna Macy talked about this as our biggest threat.

So the big inquiry is when the fear arises, instead of spiraling into that chain of reactivity and either bad othering people and blaming or else shutting down, how do we instead use our presence to be able to transform it? And I want to add to that, there’s something I’ve been paying more and more attention to, which is that in addition to presence, we have this superpower of imagination. And it’s something that really helps in times when we’re in a limbic hijack because it’s so hard to remember the larger picture.

James, I’d like to share a myth with you if that’s okay that has really inspired me on this. And it really has everything to do with breaking this limbic hijack and having the capacity to work with fear and choose love. I heard this first through Michael Meade. It’s an old Native story, and it doesn’t begin with “Once upon a time.” It begins with “This time,” and it says that every human is searching for true wisdom, love, awakening, and it lies in a cave nearby, always nearby. But we don’t find it if we’re distracted by the rush of modern life, if we’re in that trance of anxiety and reactivity, the speed of these times.

So inside the cave, an old woman is weaving the most beautiful garment ever imagined. But now and then she has to pause and stir a pot over the fire at the back of the cave, and the pot holds all the seeds of the earth. If it’s left unstirred, the seeds will burn. Life itself will vanish. While she’s away, a black dog slips in and unravels her weaving thread by thread until only chaos remains. And when she returns, she pauses, but not in anger—in stillness, in presence, in this deep inner listening. And she brings her heart to all that is to the suffering and the preciousness of life. So she pauses, she opens to the experience of the moment, and then she picks up a thread. And in that thread, she envisions an even more beautiful garment, one that didn’t exist before the unraveling.

So the elders say, don’t curse the dog. Don’t go into blame and anger and aggression, because if nothing fell apart, nothing new could be imagined. And the old woman is the world dreaming force itself. It’s that creativity and imagination that arises in each of us when we are living in presence.

So, just to unpack for a moment, because that’s a lot, we’re in an unraveling right now, and we can see the unprocessed fear and the violence of blaming, the conditioned reflex to blame the dog, either an enemy or sometimes ourself. And if we don’t blame, we go indifferent. We go numb. So that’s the heart closing. So our task as awakening beings, as bodhisattvas, which is the woman in the cave collectively, 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 grieving and underneath that to love. And then, from that space, we have the imagination and the energy and the hope and courage to create a better future. So I’m loving that myth because it feels to me as it really addresses these times.

James Shaheen: Well, the woman says yes to the reality of this moment, and you talk about saying yes to the reality of this moment. You know, things happen so quickly. Fear, anger, separation, these things happen so quickly. How is it that we prepare and create space so that when this does happen, we’re conscious of it?

Tara Brach: Well, that’s a great question, because that’s our everyday predicament. And so sometimes we miss it, but we catch the suffering afterward and we kind of look back and say, “Okay, that’s where I have to pay more attention.” Sometimes we catch it midway through, like we’re an hour into a kind of storm of anger and resentment.

James Shaheen: Two hours, three hours.

Tara Brach: Yeah, or decades. But that is the spiritual path. We are remembering to remember and being able to interrupt old habits and begin to plant the seeds for choosing love and being more creative. I mean, I’m thinking right now of a woman. I worked with her about eight months ago. She was very involved with immigration justice, and she repeatedly had these risings of real rage and anger and hatred toward individuals in this administration of the United States, ICE agents, all those that were really rooting to deport.

And so each round, as soon as she’d become aware of it, she tried to bring that presence to the anger and just say, “Okay, it’s like this, this belongs.” And she started finding that when she slowed it down, underneath the anger, she was feeling powerlessness, fear that it’s going to get worse and people that she loved and had been really working with, their lives were being destroyed. And then this huge grief. And she just would sit there and grieve and feel that self-compassion, and it brought her back to this presence and caring that wants to protect life.

And so every time she could do that, get back to the caring, she was more able to respond from a sane place, an intelligent place, a more creative place. And she had to do it also with others. And I just want to keep mentioning that it wasn’t a lone self bodhisattva. She would do it with others that were and are deeply dedicated to helping. But having that ground of coming underneath the anger to the caring, because whenever we’re angry, there’s something we deeply care about. And if we act from the anger, we’re actually seeding more of the same. So if we can get down to the caring, we begin to be part of creating and weaving a new world.

James Shaheen: You know, I am thinking, as you’re talking, I mean, the challenge can be daunting, and I agree with you that doing it with others, sangha, community, makes all the difference. It’s the same as with sitting, for instance. There’s a certain momentum that builds as you sit together. It’s very different from sitting by oneself. But there’s anger and overwhelm, those are so common right now, and cynicism. It’s easy to slip into cynicism. So can you say something about anger and overwhelm? I mean, you said something about anger, but overwhelm is a big one. I mentioned burnout before. But these are such big obstacles.

Tara Brach: I agree. A lot of people on some level say, “Abstractly I care, but it’s too much and I’ve just got to get through the day,” and I totally understand. The challenge is that overwhelm and going numb or indifferent are defenses that cover over a very deep level of anxiety, and the anxiety doesn’t go away. It just impacts our life from the sidelines so we never can actually relax and open to the moment. We’re always in some way defending against or anxious that the next moment’s going to be something we can’t handle. And especially for practitioners, for people on a spiritual path, that suffering becomes the place that we pay attention. And it’s really important if you’re feeling chronically overwhelmed, if there’s that background of anxiety to say, “Okay, what’s asking for attention?” and to let that be the portal, the place that we deepen attention and bring care.

What I’ve found when I do it and when other people it, when we really bring that presence to that anxiety that’s in there, something softens. Something softens and allows us to start sensing that we’re larger than the overwhelmed self, and we start beginning to act from that larger space of who we are. But it does take a commitment, as I’m saying, to not just get habituated to overwhelm but to say, “Okay, this is my path. How do I wake up through it?”

James Shaheen: You note that we can’t meet the world with clarity and love unless we first inhabit our own being. So can you say more about how cultivating embodied awareness can shape how we show up in the world?

Tara Brach: Yeah, the ground level for everything that matters to us is embodied awareness. The mechanism of fear is that we actually leave. We want to get away from the feeling, so we go into thoughts, and there may be an unpleasantness in the body, but we’re mostly in thoughts, and then we’re living out of fear thoughts. And so the only way to live from a more whole sense of our being, and if you think of it in terms of what’s going on in the brain, if we’re just living from fear, we’re cut off from the more recently evolved parts of our brain, which have to do with compassion and empathy and mindfulness and collaboration and that kind of thing.

To reconnect with our full potential, we need to come back into our body. Our issues are in our tissues. If we don’t process and feel what’s in our body, we’re tensing against it, and we’re not living from fullness. So a lot of the practice is to shift from the head back into the body and the heart over and over again. And that’s why I call it courageous because it’s not easy and it takes a deep intentionality. And it’s very rewarding because we start feeling like we’re more at home in ourselves, which is really a gift. We belong. We belong to this body and to the earth body and to each other. And we cannot feel that when we’re dissociated and in fear.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, being dissociated and in fear, when the emotions run through us so quickly, we act on them, often with very bad consequences. I mentioned that a little bit earlier, and one practice you discuss is the sacred art of pausing, which you describe as a courageous act of remembering that helps us reconnect with the deeper truth of our being. So can you talk about this practice, the sacred art of pausing?

Tara Brach: Yeah, well, pausing is great in any moment. Any moment that we just stop, all of a sudden reality floods in. And when we know that we’re in a situation that’s going to bring up reactivity, pausing is what gives us access to the parts of ourselves we most value. And so I think for myself, the example that’s best is that I very quickly go into bad othering, into blaming when I take in news of the world. And so I started this practice of pausing. I’m thinking of it now, because we’re attacking Iran, and I actually started this practice in 2003, a very formal practice of pausing, because we were attacking Iraq. We were about to go to war. And I was in this space of really bad othering the hawks in this administration and so on. I would read the newspaper, then it was a physical newspaper, and then I would put it down and pause, and just as we’re talking about, in that pause, I’d say, “Okay, what’s happening?” And I’d sense the anger that’s there and the bad othering. And then I would say, “Okay, what else? What’s under this?” And as I described earlier, it just brought me to a sense that this is out of control. I’m powerless. There’s going to be huge amounts of suffering, ripples and ripples of it. And then I get down to grief and caring, and that pause lets me then act more from caring.

I remember back then I was involved with an interfaith group that was really trying to protest for peace, and I remember going to a rally with everyone really from that place of caring and others too. There were children with signs saying, “We don’t want to bomb the children of Iraq.” You know, it was things like that. It was really beautiful. And I remember a lot of us got arrested, and I remember the police making jokes about white-collar crime, because there were a lot of priests and ministers.

The point is that the response to our world that comes from anger or fear ends up really creating the same energies in the world. It perpetuates them. So it takes pausing, whether it’s our personal life or our collective life, to break those patterns. And that’s where our power is: to pause and open to the reality that’s right here and respond from a deeper, wider sense of our belonging.

James Shaheen: I’m going to get to something you refer to as our own basic goodness in a moment, but I just want to say that I know your teachings, and the interesting thing is it’s not one and done. I mean, we have to open again and again and again because sometimes when we open it can feel unsustainable or unbearable, and we can shut more tightly than we were before. We can become more closed. So I just wanted to say that you often emphasize or have emphasized in the past the necessity of this being a regular practice. We open once, and we find ourselves closing off again, and we have to do it again and again and again. Can you say something about that?

Tara Brach: It is true that every time we open and we’re able to stay present, what we practice, we get stronger in. And the patterns, they’re not in us; they’re in the society living through us. It’s not our fault that we feel divided from others. It’s not our fault that we feel angry. It’s not our fault that we feel overwhelmed. It’s just in the field. So yeah, it takes repeating and, as we keep talking about, not to underestimate the power of practicing with others, because part of what gives power to these energies is that we take them personally. We in some way feel like it’s my fault that I’m feeling this and that I’m alone in feeling this, and that is oppressive. But when we practice together, and that’s one of the reasons that there’s a growing number of people doing RAIN partners, which anybody can do. You can find out information on my website on that. We actually have a lot more access to wisdom, to sensing that we’re not so identified because we’re with others.

James Shaheen: Right. Another way to counter that self-blame, I guess, is understanding that pausing or cultivating embodied experience can be an opportunity to tap back into what you call our own basic goodness, which can help us also see the good in others. So can you talk about how we can begin to recognize goodness in ourselves and in others? I know this can be difficult, especially when we’re in a mindset of othering. So could you say something about what you mean by our own basic goodness, seeing good in others and using that as an antidote?

Tara Brach: Yeah. Well first of all, as the Dalai Lama says, everyone has buddha-nature. As the Buddhist says, everyone has buddha-nature. The very heart of this path is that the awareness and love that we call buddha-nature is our source, and it lives through all of us, and it is one of the most profound practices and necessary practices in the world to learn to see it.

The reason it’s a practice is because we have all this conditioning, this fear conditioning. It’s part of the most primitive parts of our brain to scan for what’s wrong in ourselves and others. So we need to counter it, and the antidote is seeing the goodness that’s everywhere. There are many ways to do it. We can look through the eyes of someone we trust and love. We can look through the eyes of our own wise self. We can pray, if we don’t see it, to see it, because that prayer itself comes from our basic goodness. It’s like the love in us is calling us back to love. And it’s incredibly powerful to see it in others and to mirror it. Because when I look at you and I see this person that has been dedicated for all these decades to helping to serve, bringing dharma, bringing truth, bringing heart forward through Tricycle, when I see you and see that dedication and see your goodness, it warms my heart. And my hope would be that the mirroring on some level brings you home a little bit more in this moment. We really need it.

There’s a story that really struck me about the power of seeing goodness. And this is a story about John Lewis. Most people listening will know of him as a civil rights leader and congressman. He was talking about being attacked in 1961 at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He and a colleague were beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men, and they didn’t fight back, and they didn’t press charges. They treated their wounds and continued their work. About five decades later, one of the attackers, whose name was Elwin Wilson, walked into Lewis’s Capitol Hill office with his son. And he said, “I’m one of the men who beat you, and I want to atone. Will you forgive me?” And so Lewis said, “I forgave him, and we embraced, and he and his son and I, we all wept. And then we talked.” But after he shared that, he said quietly, almost to himself, “People can change.” People can change.

So I’m sharing that James, because the word bodhicitta, the awakened heart, being able to see that potential in all of us and trusting in that, allows us to keep going. For him, despite everything he had seen that spoke to our capacity for cruelty and injustice and hate, his sense that people can change gave him the spiritual imagination to keep going, to work for change. And so I feel like one of the deepest things to dedicate ourselves to is seeing past the mask of how humans get conditioned to the awakening heart. I think of one Tibetan teacher who said, “Never give up on anyone.” It doesn’t mean that people will change in our timeline or the way we expect, but everyone has buddha-nature and it’s possible to manifest it. People can change.

James Shaheen: You know, that one-on-one exchange that you described, I’ve heard it before, and to hear you describe it so nicely, I’m always moved by that story. And on this theme you say that our day-to-day relationships, these one-on-one relationships or familial relationships or relationships with friends, can be training grounds for strengthening our innate capacity for love and compassion. And one practice you explore is mindful listening. I was always a terrible listener. I got better when I started doing this and other things when I became an editor here. And you say mindful listening is a form of love and even an act of healing. So tell us about engaged listening. It’s always tough, really.

Tara Brach: Well, first, you’re not alone because I think research says that 75% of the time our attention is scattered and we know it. We know when we’re in conversations and depending on how much stress there is, we’re not all there. We just know that. So again, like seeing the goodness, it requires intention and practice. And the gift is that we can truly be intimate, and we cannot truly be intimate in any moment that we’re not wholeheartedly present. So I find there are certain reminders that counteract our habits and help us arrive more fully. One of them is just to remember our intention, like if right before you and I talk, there’s some place in me that says, “I really want to connect. I don’t want to be caught in my own little separate cocoon. I want this to be connecting.” Or if I’m with somebody and I know I’ve got a lot to get done, I’ll sometimes say, “Just slow down and arrive here.” And I’ll even say to myself, “I have time. I have time.” Because we have this mantra in our brain saying, “There’s not enough time. There’s not enough time.” And just to say “I have time,” “I have time this moment.”

And then the other thing that helps me is to get really curious. Like, I want to understand, I want to know more who you are so that I’m listening and I’m also listening to who’s behind the words. So I really invite anyone listening right now to us to just pick one person for now. It’s too much if you say I’m going to listen to everybody all the time, but just one person and really listen to what they say and what’s behind what they’re saying, and it’s radical. Offering a full presence and offering our presence is an expression of love. So it wakes up our loving.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I can talk a good game and say, “Yeah, it’s great to listen,” but sometimes at home, I shut down. I don’t listen. And sometimes it’s because I don’t want to say something or to hear something. And you discuss the courage of honest communication, where speaking difficult truths can be an act of love. And this is especially perhaps true in our very closest relationships. It’s easy enough to tell somebody else what’s on your mind if they’re not somebody you see every day. So can you talk a bit about communicating wisely across divides, whether personal or political?

Tara Brach: Okay, so maybe I’ll take that in two parts. And one is the power of speaking difficult truths, not when there’s conflict so much but when there’s vulnerability andwe’re afraid of being more real, because the deepest unfoldings that can happen are when we become more who we really are in relationship. So in those moments, and most of us have things that we know we’ve been holding back that would be hard to say, one of the questions is, “Well, what’s my real intention in saying this?” Making sure that it’s coming from the intention for more love, more connection, more understanding, and then also to be sensitive to timing and to context. And naturally, if we feel that another person is not going to be able to hold or respond well, that it could in fact be dangerous to make that sharing, that’s something to be sensitive to. But if we feel like they can handle it, to first be with our own feelings of vulnerability and fear with a huge amount of kindness and compassion and know that we’re playing an edge and that this edge can be something that opens us up to a whole field of connecting that we might not have touched, that it’s a real adventure in awakening.

So that’s one level. But I want to also name when we’re in conflict, how do we communicate wisely? And of course we could explore that for the next year because that’s like a massive domain. But because there’s so much conflict, because there’s so much divide this right now, it feels important just to touch it a bit. And the way we bridge divides basically is getting more proximate or close with ourselves first and then the other. And if we try to talk honestly and get real and bridge a divide with another but we haven’t first tended to our own anger or fears, it’s not going to work.

One of the images I use sometimes when I’m teaching is that we enter this world, and because it’s a difficult world, we take on a space suit to protect us and to help us get what we need. And the space suit is our personality and our ways of defending and expanding and getting resources and so on. When there’s a lot of unmet needs, the space suit appears either angry and violent or very defensive. And so when we’re in a spacesuit conflict, we first have to get intimate with what’s going on inside us, and then it’s easier to see past the mask of the other, because when we’re in conflict, all we’re seeing is the coverings. We’re not remembering the goodness, we’re not remembering the vulnerability.

One of the examples that comes to mind right now is one woman who is in this classic divide in her family, you know, the progressive Democrat–MAGA divide. Her brother was in the construction business, and his business, he felt, was really being threatened by low-cost labor, and he was very much adamantly supportive of this administration’s immigration policies. They usually didn’t talk about politics, but they got into a really big fight over this. So what do you do? And she did the inner work. Under her rage, she felt this fear, like, “If other people are believing like he’s believing and a lot of people are believing it, this is just going to be unending cruelty to humans.” And so she kept cycling in the beliefs and the fears, and then underneath it she could feel that helplessness and that sorrow for the world. And when she could just be with that, “Okay, it’s like this right now,” and hold that with kindness, she could see him more clearly.

So we have to get out of the limbic hijack to see others more clearly. And the big inquiry when we’re then looking at others is, What’s hurting? How are you hurting? ‘Where does it hurt?” is such a powerful question. What’s really distressing you? What are the fears or hurts that you’re carrying? What are the beliefs about your life that are keeping you tight? Where do you feel most vulnerable, and what does that vulnerability need?

So she was able to do that kind of basic inquiry that leads to compassion, seeing vulnerability. And she could see he needed to feel like he was a good person, that he wasn’t being blamed, that he wasn’t being judged, that he was understood. You know, he had a belief, a contracted belief that he was at a disadvantage, he was being taken advantage of, and he was trying to defend and protect himself. That was his spacesuit. So it helped her to see that, and it helped her to then ask herself, “What does it mean to choose to love here? How might I do this differently? How might I, in some way, let him know I love him, I care, I understand, and we can still have very different views?”

So I guess I’m giving that as an example, because there are so many times that we’re in conflict, and if we can remember the vulnerability that others are living with, we still might not be on the same page, but we’re not pushing them out of our hearts.

James Shaheen: What you just described is what you say in the book is our great hope for our world. You say it lies in our capacity to awaken the revolutionary force of compassion. And I think you just described it there in her relationship with her brother and his with her. So that was very nicely put, I think. But I’m sure you’re asked this by students all the time. What might you say to someone who feels overwhelmed or unsure about where to begin? I mean, the workbook is one possibility, but how would you answer that question?

Tara Brach: Yeah. The workbook will give some of the inner tools to deal with the sense of overwhelm and also tools on how to engage. There’s one quote that helps me over and over again. It’s John Roedel, and he says, “whenever I feel helpless / in this overwhelming world // I become a helper // oh, oh, / my love // on the days / when it feels like / I have no power // I serve others // you see, / whenever I wash / the world’s feet // my hands / immediately / stop shaking.”

So yes. Our anxiety goes down when we start washing the world’s feet because we start realizing we’re part of the world. And when we do it with others, it deepens that sense because the big illusion is that we’re a separate self, and that leads us to either feeling overwhelmed or this false heroic that can’t sustain.

A few weeks ago I was doing a webinar, and one woman was very close to the trauma and suffering in Ukraine. She described for herself having no idea what to do. It just was too much, too big. And she started this practice of just reaching out and touching the world in very, very small ways, like a text or a smile, or a hug or an errand for someone who was sick. And she said, “Reaching out saved my life.” She started trusting that the smallest thing she did was part of it. It made a difference. And that feels really, really important. I am running into so many people who want a more caring world and want to help and aren’t sure how to go about it. I often will ask the question, “Well, what really breaks your heart?” Because there’s so many ways we can help, whatever the domain is. We can support organizations, we can volunteer, we can give money, we can do things more locally, just small local. But on some level, what breaks our hearts, and what is love asking is another question. Just even today, what is love asking? That helps us to guide us in living aligned with our hearts.

James Shaheen: You know, you’re talking about things that are so easily forgotten, I mean, especially with overwhelm, stress, and so forth, what’s truly important, what truly matters. You talk about how the spiritual path can be seen as an ongoing dance of forgetting and remembering. So how can we reconnect with our aspirations and our sense of what matters most despite all this?

Tara Brach: Yeah, it’s like the Zen teachers say, that the most important thing is remembering the most important thing. It’s really that. And I so often think of a friend, a palliative caregiver who describes being with thousands of people sharing their regrets. And on some deep level it was not living true to their heart, not remembering.

So on the bodhisattva path, aspiration, remembering what matters, is actually a practice. It’s a practice just like any other practice. And I really encourage people to build it into daily meditation, to remember what’s most important, because it grounds us in daily life. Our aspiration will guide us. It will keep on being a compass that points us in the direction so we really are living aligned through the day. I can say for myself that I begin the day, I’ll do a meditation and reflect on my aspiration, which is in a deep way to keep waking up into presence and love. And then I will sense it very particularly for that day. So I’ll sense, “Okay, so what am I doing today? Who am I going to be with?” And to bring right in the moment, you know, I thought of us doing this together today, James, you know, just feeling the intention to be real and to let my heart be touched and to bring that presence here. And in whatever I’m doing, it’s like if I reflect at the beginning of the day that this matters, there’s more chance that I will not go into trance. Now, at the end of the day, I’ll often review what happened, and I’ll see the different places that I went to sleep, that I just was caught. And it’s not a judgment. It’s more that it helps to flag, “Okay, so this is where I lose it,” so I’m actually more inclined to be awake when that particular situation rises again. So aspiration really does become this living compass for how we move through the day.

James Shaheen: You know, Tara, earlier you said such nice things about Tricycle and all of the work that we do here. I should return the compliment. You reach so many people. I always see your podcast or your teachings at the top of the list. So thank you for that. And that is my way of now asking you for a favor. Could you lead us in a guided practice on the theme, say, of aspiration? You mentioned a practice you do, and it would be great if you could offer that to our listeners.

Tara Brach: My pleasure. Okay, friends who are listening, wherever you are, if you can, to come into stillness and let your attention turn inward. And you might just collect the attention with the breath for a few moments, breathing in a nice, full, deep in-breath, and a slow out-breath. So when you breathe out, there’s a sense of letting go. Letting go again, breathing in fully, and with that out-breath, letting go and softening down the length of the body. Letting go. One more time. Nice, deep in-breath, slow out-breath. Consciously releasing, dissolving outward, letting go.

So as the breath comes back into its natural rhythm, now you can sense a little more presence. You can scan the body and sense what might want to let go a little bit more, just the habitual holding of tension, perhaps in the shoulders, softening the hands. Let there be an openness to the chest. Loosening, softening the belly so the breath comes deep into the torso. See if you can feel this body breathing and let your senses be awake. And you can let the breath come directly to the area of the heart. So your breathing and feeling the heart, noticing the state of the heart, letting whatever’s here belong. This belongs.

And now with a gentle inquiry, just ask yourself, What’s most important in this life? If you were at the end of your life looking back, what would matter about today? What’s the quality of heart or presence you want to live from or offer to this world? Just take a moment. What really matters?

Now, if you find that the first response is something that leans toward more concrete or situational, like, “I want to find a partner or succeed in my work,” or whatever, these are real desires, but there may be something really essential underneath. So just askL If that happened, what would that give me? What is it? What’s the felt sense experience that you’re longing for? What’s the way of living that you’re longing for? Perhaps it’s to love more freely or to live with more presence, to serve, to awaken, to heal.

Whatever you’re finding, you might mentally whisper your aspiration like a prayer with sincerity and feel into the experience of embodying it, what it is you’re longing for right here. If it’s to live with more presence, feel the presence right here. What’s it like? If it’s to love more freely, feel that right this moment and let it be as big as it is.

You can trust that by remembering what matters, by feeling into it, you nourish its unfolding. You might sense as you move forward through this day how remembering what matters might guide you in very real ways in relating to your inner life, others, and our world. Thank you.

James Shaheen: Thanks so much, Tara. Thank you for the conversation and the meditation. It’s a great way to close. It’s been such a pleasure seeing you and talking to you again. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Courageous Heart Workbook, available now. Thanks again, Tara.

Tara Brach: Oh, thank you, James. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Tara Brach. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!