Tara Brach

Marge, a woman in our meditation community, was in a painful standoff with her teenage son. At 15, Micky was in a downward spiral of skipping classes and using drugs, and had just been suspended for smoking marijuana on school grounds. While Marge blamed herself—she was the parent, after all—she was also furious at him. The piercings she hadn’t approved, the lies, stale smell of cigarettes, and earphones that kept him in his own removed world—every interaction with Micky left her feeling powerless, angry, and afraid. The more she tried to take control with her criticism with “groundings” and other ways of setting limits, the more withdrawn and defiant Micky became. When she came in for a counseling session, she wanted to talk about why the entire situation was really her fault. An attorney with a large firm, Marge felt she’d let her career get in the way of attentive parenting. She’d divorced Micky’s father when the boy was entering kindergarten and her new partner, Jan, had ...

We are designed through evolution to protect and further ourselves. While this is universal, if you look closely at your life, you might find that the navigating ego goes beyond the call. Have you noticed how many life moments are devoted to navigating obstacles and solving problems? How often your mind is worrying about something, anticipating what’s around the corner, preparing for what might go wrong? I call this mind-set the Over-Controller, and the more we feel threatened, the more the Over-Controller is on duty. Recognizing the Suffering of the Over-Controller The suffering comes when our effort to be in control becomes chronic and we forget who we really are. The Over-Controller is addicted to doing. An image that comes to mind is Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill and then just watching it roll down over and over again. When we’re pushing the boulder — pre-occupied, straining to get somewhere else — we forget the consciousness, the tender heart-space, that is right...

I sometimes think that the most basic truths are the ones that we most regularly forget, and one of them is: If we are turned on ourselves, we cannot love this life. The turning on ourselves contracts us. In those moments, we are disconnected from our inner life and from each other. We move through the day with an undercurrent of I’m not okay, but are unaware of how much it’s affecting our capacity to relax and enjoy our moments. The Second Arrow of Self-Blame In Buddhist teachings, the Buddha described two arrows. The first arrow is the natural experience that arises in this human animal that we are, for example: fear, aggression, greed, craving. The second arrow is self-aversion for the fact of the first arrow. We have the experience of being nasty, selfish or greedy, and we don’t like ourselves for that. That’s the second arrow. The Buddha says: “The first arrow hurts, why do we shoot the second arrow into us, ourselves?” And yet we do. He goes on to say: “In life, we cannot...

In Shamanistic cultures, it is believed that when a person is traumatized, their soul leaves their body as a way to protect itself from intolerable pain. In a process known as Soul Retrieval, trusted community members surround the person with tremendous love and safety. In this sacred space, the soul is invited back in so the person can become whole. When Our Coping Strategies Fail In the simplest terms, trauma happens when our nervous system becomes overwhelmed and our most primal coping strategies fail. If we are unable to fight or flee what is attacking us, we freeze and disconnect or dissociate in a way that the unprocessed fear gets locked into our body. We become “stuck” in a biological state of stress, fear and reactivity, leading to chronic anxiety, depression, addictions and, often, the constellation of symptoms that we call PTSD. This process of disconnecting and living with reactivity to the unprocessed fear is not a rational choice. Rather it’s a coping strategy th...

Throughout history, deception has been an effective survival strategy. Yet, like all primitive survival strategies, when deception becomes habitual and is not directly about survival, it prevents us from continuing growth. For each of us, to the degree that we are not real with ourselves or that we withhold important truths from others, we just cannot keep evolving. The Call for a Deeper Commitment We can see in our own lives and in the larger society how dishonesty poisons our world with cynicism and mistrust. One understanding that seems clear is that our future is threatened by these toxins — greed and aggression that proliferate when we are not facing and speaking truth. This suffering is calling for us to deepen our commitment to truth-telling and being real with ourselves and each other. Adrienne Rich writes: “An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word  love  — […]is a process of refining the truths they ...

I often talk about how suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt parts of ourselves. Only when we become aware of what is here and bring presence to what we have been running from can we discover wholeness and freedom. The same is true when we explore our relationships to each other and the world. We cannot be free if we are pushing anyone out of our hearts. If we are discounting, rejecting, or turning away, we are not living from our wholeness. It creates suffering. When we live in resentment, we have separated ourselves and pulled away from our belonging. Trance of the Unreal Other All life forms are designed to perceive separation. It is part of our evolutionary story. And in moments that we find ourselves stuck in reactivity or in some conflict or division, we create what I call an  unreal other . Rather than a living, feeling Being with wants, needs and fears, another person has become an idea in our mind and is not subjectively alive or real to us. They are two-dimens...

I remember when I was on a book tour for  Radical Acceptance , one of the places I stopped was the Buddhist university, Naropa, and they had a big poster with a big picture of me and, underneath the photo, the caption was:  Something is wrong with me. The Trance of Unworthiness: Forgetting Who We Are I wrote about the  Trance of Unworthiness  in  Radical Acceptance  14 years ago, and I’ve found, over the years, that it is still pretty much the most pervasive expression of suffering that I encounter in myself and in those I’ve worked with. It comes out as fear or shame —  a feeling of being fundamentally flawed, unacceptable, not enough.  Who I am is not okay . A core teaching of the Buddha is that we suffer because we forget who we really are. We forget the essence — the awareness and the love that’s here — and we become caught in an identity that’s less than who we are. When we are in the  trance of unworthiness , we’re not aware ...

Our Life Experience is Shaped by Our Beliefs Ghandi describes how our beliefs become our thoughts and emotions which influence our behavior, and how our behavior creates our character and then that determines our destiny. In other words, the familiar pattern of thoughts that continuously cycle through our minds actually ends up shaping our life experience. Beliefs about ourselves and the world that cause suffering arise from our experiences of severed belonging — the wounding that happens early in life when we get the message, from our families and our culture, that there is something about us that is not okay. And we all have a negativity bias, which means that the conditioning is strong to seek evidence and latch on to whatever confirms that  sense that something is wrong with me . The Trance of Limiting Beliefs When we are suffering, we are believing something that is not true. To live inside the belief that we or others are bad and wrong is suffering. Rather than dir...

Marge, a woman in our meditation community, was in a painful standoff with her teenage son. At fifteen, Micky was in a downward spiral of skipping classes and using drugs, and had just been suspended for smoking marijuana on school grounds. While Marge blamed herself—she was the parent, after all—she was also furious at him. The piercings she hadn’t approved, the lies, stale smell of cigarettes, and earphones that kept him in his own removed world—every interaction with Micky left her feeling powerless, angry, and afraid. The more she tried to take control with her criticism, with “groundings” and other ways of setting limits, the more withdrawn and defiant Micky became. When she came in for a counseling session, she wanted to talk about why the entire situation was really her fault. An attorney with a large firm, Marge felt she’d let her career get in the way of attentive parenting. She’d divorced Micky’s father when the boy was entering kindergarten, and her new partner, Jan,...