Practical Dharma for Stressful Times

Tara Brach

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🗓️ 7 November 2012

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

2012-11-07 - Practical Dharma for Stressful Times - When we are caught in a stress reaction, we are in a trance that cuts us off from our creativity, full intelligence and capacity to be loving. This talk explores the flags of the stress-trance and three meditative strategies for shifting from fight/flight to attend/befriend. 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	It was interesting reflecting on, well, what do I want to talk about tonight, being the
0:21.3	date that it is right after a major election and not knowing what emotion will be up, whether
0:27.5	it be grief or relief or whatever it was, you know, I was unsure. It's interesting a couple
0:33.8	of weeks ago we had a post reporter here who interviewed a number of people that were here at
0:38.7	this class and myself and his big conclusion was this is the grand conclusion from all the
0:45.0	interviews is that meditators are stressed like everybody else about the season, you know, about
0:49.9	what's going on and you know, if you add sandy and the weather extremes and that this part of
0:57.8	the year is always that very intense beating up on the way to the holidays, it's stressful. So
1:06.0	no matter what state of mind we are in post-election, there's still something about sensing the
1:13.7	undercurrents and the speed and the intensity of the season that's really caught my attention.
1:19.0	So I was thinking about Gandhi who was asked what he thought of Western civilization and his
1:28.1	response was it would be a good idea, you know, and yeah, it feels like these are intense times
1:37.2	and when we're caught inside the feeling of being stressed, whether it's excited,
1:42.6	stressed or anxious, stressed that intensity which will be the theme tonight, we're going to be
1:49.9	exploring our stress reaction. When we're in the thick of it, what we most value, whether we
2:00.2	call it kindness or service or creativity or full aliveness, we're cut off some from that.
2:07.2	When we're in stress, we're in some form of a fight flight response that does not let us have
2:13.2	access to the dimensions of our being that are really our full potential. So I'm aware that the
2:24.9	word stress stresses so overused that we forget that when we're in a stress reaction,
2:34.1	it's actually a trans state and by trans I mean we're in a trans whenever our minds are narrowed
2:43.6	and confined and we're forgetting a larger reality and we're so familiar with being busy and pressured
2:53.5	and trying to get something done and being tense and being short, it's so familiar that we
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