Back to the Garden

Tara Brach

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🗓️ 1 August 2012

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2012-08-01 - Back to the Garden - The suffering of perceiving ourselves as separate selves expresses as fear, aggression, shame and a host of other afflictive emotions. This talk examines how, by taking refuge in the present moment, and taking refuge in love, we reconnect with our wholeness, and the timeless presence that is home. This inquiry includes a guided meditation on the power of prayer to carry us back to our natural belonging. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Transcript

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0:00.0	To begin with a story after the Buddha's enlightenment, after his night under the Bodhi
0:22.1	tree, he spent some time walking around and people would meet with him and see that he looked
0:29.2	very, he had a glow. He looked very bright and very peaceful and a lot of interest in,
0:37.2	you know, who is this guy? And they'd ask him, they'd say, who are you? And his response,
0:42.4	they'd say, are you a healer? No. You know, are you a saint? No. You know, are you in some,
0:50.0	some way a master or a contemplative? No. You know, he'd answer no to, are you a holy man? No.
0:56.8	And finally, his response was this, I am awake. Just that, I am awake.
1:07.1	And what I love about this story is if we ask ourselves about the moments in our life when we
1:17.1	feel perhaps most happy or peaceful or inwardly free. And then we say, well, in those moments,
1:25.5	you know, when we're really feeling that kind of ease, what's our sense of who we are? And we're
1:33.2	not going to go and say, well, I'm a professional did at the dare and we're not going to go and say,
1:38.4	well, you know, I'm a social activist or I'm a Buddhist or I'm a Latino or we don't, that's not where
1:43.7	our minds go. Because we're living in a sense of being that's broader than any identity we can name.
1:54.9	Like the Buddha, there's a wakeful openness, a heart field, a space, a tenderness, but it's
2:03.8	narrowing to come up with an identity. So in contrast, when we're very upset, when we're angry,
2:13.9	when we're reactive, when we're playing out an addiction, if that question comes up, who am I?
2:20.2	The sense of self is very small, very solid. And in those moments pretty identified as a wanting
2:26.8	self or a fearful self or an addicted self or whatever, but we're very solid. And the other
2:35.1	characteristic is there's a sense of separateness. And when we're in a strong, reactive,
2:42.2	unpleasant emotional state, always with that, we might not be noticing it, but we feel very alone.
2:48.4	We feel very much like we're here in the world's way out there, separateness.
2:54.3	From the Judeo-Christian, the myth of our part of this world, we're kicked out of the garden in those
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