Healing Self-Doubt

Tara Brach

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🗓️ 3 November 2013

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2013-10-30 - Healing Self-Doubt - Siddhartha Gautama’s last challenge before enlightenment was doubt, and to some degree, most of us live with limiting beliefs about our own worthiness and goodness. This talk looks at the tenacity of self-doubt and the power of mindfulness, investigation and compassion in releasing its grip.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This last week at our week-long retreat, we have, as some of you know, we have individual
0:20.9	interviews for those that stayed during the week and during one of them, one woman I
0:26.1	was with was describing some of the challenge she was going through and really trusting herself,
0:33.3	trusting herself as a good person, as a, you know, how she's doing in her parenting,
0:41.4	really her quality of care, and just really in a deep way judging herself. And I shared
0:48.4	a story I often share in those circumstances, which is the most famous part of the Buddha's
0:58.1	mythology. And this is a story of the night of the Buddha who is under the Bodhi tree and during
1:05.5	his time under the Bodhi tree, the tree of awakening, he encountered all the shadow energies.
1:12.3	That was his experience. It came that the God, Mara is the God of the shadow side, greed,
1:19.0	hatred, delusion. And so through the night of sitting under the Bodhi tree, the slings and arrows
1:26.9	and weaponry of Mara was slung at the Buddha. And through the night he met it with the real
1:33.6	quality of mindful awareness and of heart. And as the story goes, all the energies of hatred and
1:43.9	of aversion and passion and greed and so on, they'd come at the Buddha and they'd turn into
1:49.8	these flowers in his energy field. And by the time that morning Star was beginning to appear,
1:55.9	there was a heap of flowers in front of the Buddha. Then Mara pulled out his final grade challenge.
2:04.5	This is the last one, the big one. And some of you might know what that one is. Anyone want to say it?
2:12.2	What was the final challenge that the Buddha encountered? The final part of the shadow side.
2:17.5	Anyone? Yeah, doubt. Mara basically said to the Buddha at the time when he was called Siddharth,
2:24.3	he wasn't a fully enlightened being. He said, who do you think you are? That question, who do you
2:30.5	think you are? To really assume the seed of a Buddha, to assume that capacity for an awakened
2:37.8	heart and mind. And the Buddha, again, was meeting all of this with a great amount of mindfulness and
2:45.2	compassion. But when that final challenge came, this was a big one. He shifted gears a bit.
	...

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