#tara-brach — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #tara-brach, aggregated by home.social.
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Seeing in the dark
Sitting this evening by the window, with the small sparkling lights of traffic flickering down the garden from the road beyond, there seemed to be no border, no place in myself or in the luminous dark beyond the glass where I could find an end or a beginning. Great upwellings of thought came and dispersed, leaving no memory I could discern in that moment. Somehow it was as though a crystalline space surrounded me; and yet I was that edgeless expanse just as much as I was the almost motionless body whose weight now rested in an immeasurable skein of gravity conditioned by who knew what accretions of mass and causes, out beyond discerning.
“The spiritual warrior fights darkness not other humans”, said Tara Brach in a recent podcast; and yet it is not a fight as anyone would think of combat. It is merely a settled intent to understand, to love, what is – David Jones‘ “…for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“. Jones is referring, I assume, to Spinoza’s use of the phrase: to see something sub specie aeternitatis being to understand it as a part of the infinite and eternal substance – God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) – beyond the constraints of time and place. (Ethics 5, p23s)
To sit in silence, and to love what actually is – this is possibly the most revolutionary act we are capable of. And yet even to say that is a thought; but what it represents is not. It is no thing; and to see it is to be no more than the night air, and the evening star over the leafless hazels. Only be still.
#awareness #BenedictusSpinoza #DavidJones #philosophy #stillness #TaraBrach
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Merely to bear witness
When we discuss, as I did the other day, the question of free will and determinism, it is all too easy to get caught up in intellectual debate, but this was not my intention. I wrote then, “Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time.” To see this directly for oneself, rather than think about it, is the beginning of our actual awakening.
But the state of accepting realisation that Spinoza refers to in his Ethics as “blessedness” is not arrived at by debate or dialectic, despite Spinoza’s own sometimes misleading phrase “the intellectual love of God”. It is simply the immediate embrace of this “radical acceptance”, in Tara Brach’s phrase, of what actually is.
In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes:
The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…
[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing” [Dzogchen].
But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…
With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.
To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet if we remain still enough to see that all that appears – sense objects, thoughts, feelings, memories – are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed – from which all change proceeds.
#acceptance #BenedictusSpinoza #phenomenology #philosophy #stillness #TaraBrach
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I love Tara Brach. I feel like someone should use her Dharma sessions in songs kinda like some people did with Alan Watts
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https://mindflex.fr/l-acceptation-radicale-faites-la-paix-avec-votre-jumeau-malefique/
🗣 Cet article est une bombe : Une immersion totale dans les recoins les plus sombres de notre âme, comme une plongée dans un jacuzzi un peu trop chaud. Un truc qui vous fait bouillir à l’intérieur, mais, croyez-moi, qui vous nettoie à fond...
#meditation #pleineconscience #stress #meditationpleineconscience #empathie #compassion #tarabrach
@Mindflex -
Seamarks
The Buddha’s teaching was focussed on the one purpose of showing how to find the end of suffering. He identified the cause of suffering as the afflictions of ignorance and desire and set out a path leading to liberation from these afflictions. That path begins with the recognition of the need to train oneself. This arises from an inner prompting and an observation of how suffering touches everyone, that all things are impermanent and there is nothing substantial in which we can find true refuge. Next comes the need for an ethical life for ourselves so that we can know peace and tranquillity, and to help others, since through sympathetic understanding we realize that others suffer in the same way as we do.
Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha
The Buddha did not found a religion – he taught a way of contemplation, a way out of the confusion and panic that so much of human life seems to consist in, where we know that even the pleasures and satisfactions we seek so desperately are spoilt by our fear of losing them even in the instant they are grasped.
The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by misreading our senses and interpreting the data in a manner that suggests an “I”. It seems as though stuff happens to “me”. I have the impression of being one thing and the world around me another thing. I am drawn to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This basic motivation has its roots in the feeling of an “I” set against the world…
In questioning the basic assumption that this “I” is real and permanent, Buddhism teaches that the “I” we treasure has no independent existence of its own and cannot exist without everything else being the way that it is. All of existence is interdependent so to view the “I” as a separate thing is an illusion.
Morgan, ibid.
In these realisations there are no gods or demons, and no angels or prophets either. The Buddha taught simply, “Verify for yourself whether what I teach corresponds with the truth…”
Philosophical Taoism is not a religion either. Neither in Laozi nor in Zhuangzi can we find a pattern of worship or a dogma laid down, though there are plenty of references to the gods of traditional Chinese folk religion. It is more an approach to metaphysics than a faith, and its ideal is the person of wisdom and understanding rather than devotion.
In the thousands of years these teachings have been knocking around human history, they have accrued countless superstitions and religious structures and rituals; but none of these is more than tradition and observance. The central philosophy, and its roots in practice, may evolve; but they remain praxis, not doctrine.
It seems to me that contemporary, largely humanist, understandings of contemplative spirituality are a vital next step in being able to “verify for [ourselves]”. Writers like Tara Brach, Sam Harris, Toni Bernhard and Susan Blackmore likewise are not looking for followers, but trying to pass on the fruit of their own experience. Each generation seems to find its own contemplative language, and each of us has our own small measure of responsibility in carrying that forward; in sharing, directly or indirectly, some of the seamarks we have noticed on our own voyages. No one else can do it for us…
#contemplative #DaishinMorgan #humanism #philosophy #practice #SamHarris #secularism #SusanBlackmore #TaraBrach #ToniBernhard
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Ein Moment radikaler #Akzeptanz ist ein Moment echter #Freiheit.
(Tara #Brach)
#psychotHHerapie #Zitat #Zitate #TaraBrach -
Just watched a powerful, and deeply challenging, piece by #TaraBrach, on navigating times like this, when there is so much hate and pain in the world.
https://www.tarabrach.com/navigating-the-dark-ages-2/
And it's personally challenging because I can see the value of approaching hate with love. And I've also taken great satisfaction in being in the front of a counter-protest, and literally pushing back on hate in a very confrontational way.
But at my core I can -feel- that she's right.
#buddhism #meditation #resistance -
Facing Fear: Awakening Your Fearless Heart, Part I - Tara Brach - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNjFU6BYLCA #Meditation #Mindfulness #TaraBrach
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"We have to feel our feelings. The cure for the pain is in the pain."
#TaraBrach, Awakening through Difficult Emotions
https://tarabrach.libsyn.com/awakening-through-difficult-emotions -
@clairely_inexplicable Stumbled on you comment. Somewhat off topic. No trans experience just disruptive soul childhood recovey. Tara Brach on RAIN reflections/preprocess a life changer for me/some. https://www.tarabrach.com/rain/ #TaraBrach #TarabrachRAIN ☮️
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"There's a fear that if I don't blame myself, I won't be responsible. We are not able to respond with wisdom and compassion if we add that 'second arrow' of self blame."
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"Feeling unlovable and feeling unworthy is a trance."