Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart

Tara Brach

Tara, Dharma, Selfhelp, Talks, Spiritual, Buddhist, Insight, Audio, Tarabrach, Mindfulness, Rain, Psychology, Compassion, Vipassana, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Meditation, Guided, Brach, Buddhism, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 10.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2017

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart -

There is power and potential in a time of darkness to remind us of what we really cherish. In this reflection, we practice ways of paying attention that can help us transform suffering into freedom, in our own lives and in the world around us.

The reflection closes with a reading of “School Prayer” by Diane Ackerman.

Excerpt from Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering a talk given on January 25, 2017.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following reflection is led by Tara Brock.
0:06.8	To access more of my meditations or reflections, or to join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.
0:30.0	Ultimately, I have this faith that anything that happens to us can be part of what wakes us up.
0:41.0	And it doesn't mean we want things to happen that are painful for ourselves or anybody else, not at all.
0:46.2	It just means that we can have this trust that if we know how to be in relationship with our life,
0:54.4	suffering can be a darkness of the womb.
0:58.6	And in Buddhism, this is pretty encapsulated in the prayer of the Bodhisattva, which is an awakening being,
1:07.8	which is may whatever arises may this serve the awakening of heart and awareness.
1:15.6	So what I'd like to do right now is just give you a chance to explore to someplace in your life
1:22.4	where you'd like to see whatever's going on be that kind of darkness of the womb, let it bear fruit in some way.
1:31.1	So I invite you to just take a moment to find a way to sit that's comfortable, to come into stillness, and we'll just practice together.
1:43.5	We've been moving back and forth between the personal and the societal.
1:48.8	These are practices that we need to train in, each of us in our lives to really have it ripple out into our larger world,
2:00.5	and they're practices that can be explored in groups.
2:05.6	For now, I invite you to take a scan of your personal life.
2:12.0	And since where you feel like you're caught in some way in a version hatred or conflict,
2:20.8	where there's some distance with another person, something painful going on, some suffering.
2:41.9	If you're scanning your personal life and you're not finding someone you know well, it can be someone that's in the more societal field,
2:57.7	wherever you feel a sense of conflict, of adversary, of enemy, then that's the place to attend you.
3:12.0	You'll notice that if you've picked a place of conflict that with that there's going to be perhaps the emotions of anger or fear, a versiveness.
3:29.8	In the beginning of any of these practices, it's just to have the intention that this may be the darkness of a womb.
3:43.6	And you might even try on the bodhisattva prayer, please, may these circumstances, may these feelings that I'm having,
	...

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