← Tara Brach
Tara Brach
Compassion in Times of Conflict—a Conversation with Tara, Paul Gilbert, and Rick Hanson
01:03:44
Loading summary
Transcript27 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:04]
B
Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brak Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste.
- [01:01]
A
Foreign.
- [01:11]
B
Welcome, friends. Today I want to share a conversation I had recently with Paul Gilbert. Many of you might know of him. He's a psychology professor and a researcher and founder of the Compassion Focused Therapy. So Paul has spent decades exploring how our brains are wired for threat and how we can intentionally cultivate compassion to regulate fear and heal shame and bring care into our relationships in our world. And his work has been foundational in helping us understand that first, compassion is trainable. We can train it, we can become more compassionate, and it's a profound and necessary source of resilience and courage for our times. So this conversation was moderated by Rick Hansen, dear friend. Many of you know of him. His work on resilience and positive neuroplasticities supported many, many people in their lives. And as you'll hear, together we explore some very rich and timely territory. You know, how our body's threat system is hijacking individuals, societies right now, how shame and othering fuel cycles of violence, the evolutionary roots of aggression and fear, and most importantly, how we can actively cultivate compassion in our bodies, our relationships, our institutions as a. As a really powerful response to conflict and really the key capacity that can bring healing to our wider society. So I hope you listen and find understanding and also a deepened trust in your own capacity to meet this world with a caring heart. Thank you, friends.
- [03:17]
C
I think one of the fundamental themes that we'll be exploring is vulnerabilities, our human vulnerabilities. And then how do we manage them? And I find for myself one of the ways that at least I manage some of my own vulnerabilities is through rational reassurance, realistic reassurance, especially around finding my place. It's okay. The technology's working. Electricity is happening. My friends are here. So anyway, those of you who are watching me appreciate that as well. Well, we're going to begin by exploring the roots of both our challenges, particularly around interpersonal and intergroup conflict, and also the roots of our capacities to manage them, particularly through the cultivation of factors inside the mind, inside the physical body, and between ourselves and other people. So we're not going to focus on one exclusive to others. And if we do focus on one, it's not because we don't care about other sources of helping things be better in this life. Okay, so if it's okay, according to our so called plan, which will probably go out the window fairly quickly here, Paul, maybe you could start us off as a real expert, someone that I've learned immensely from, many have. And I know, Tara, you've talked about that too. Very knowledgeable of what a long, strange trip it's been. You know, the 600 million year journey of the evolution of the nervous system and how we got here. So maybe you can take us into that, Paul.
- [04:52]
A
Well, thank you very much for setting this up. It's a delight to be here and also to be with Tara, who's been a leading light on compassion and compassion meditation and bringing compassion ways of being into the world for many, many years. So this is a great honor for me, really. Okay, so let's have a look and see if we can look at how the brain has evolved to be capable of compassion and what that actually means. So let me just go to here and we can see that. Okay, there we go. So this is Rick's idea of us and them. I'm going to take about seven minutes or so, so it's not going to be a long time to talk about these themes. Let me get rid of that. And here we go. So I think one of the interesting things is today, probably many of you are aware that the spirituality and sciences are beginning to come together. And we're all interested in this concept of the nature of reality and how we fit into it. What is the nature of consciousness? We're now beginning to think that consciousness may actually operate outside of the brain. It's not just generated by the brain. But this has really major implications because when we look at the nature of compassion, one of the things compassion does is to address the harmful mind. And I was lucky enough to talk about this theme in 2015 with the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama is very clear that meditative practices are partly to address the harmful side of the mind. It's not just about creating insight and happiness that is to do that. So when we think about the evolved brain and what we know or what we believe or what the materialists believe is that consciousness comes out of the complexity of the brain. The brain evolves, gets very complicated, lots of things. Oh, and there we are. Look, consciousness has just appeared and then at some point we have this capacity for self consciousness. And that itself is also an interesting story now in the Contemplated Traditions and Tara will talk much more about this, they completely reverse that. For them, consciousness is the ground of all being. Consciousness is empty, has no, has no form itself. But it gives rise to energy fields which give rise to some atomic particles. Atoms give rise to molecules, molecules give rise to bodies and planets and suns and life and all of that. But none of it has any individual existence because it's all simply patterns. And those patterns keep coming. They appear and they disappear. So when my body dies, all of the atoms in my body will. Someone, someone else, somewhere will have to have them, I suppose, but they'll go out, they will no longer be a coherent form or. GILBERT Right. So these are very important things and understanding how these different systems relate together is very important. Now from the Buddhist point of view, there are two kinds of truths really. One is called the ultimate truth and one is the relative truth. And the relative truth is really understanding the constructions of a brain that can be a source of a lot of suffering. Whereas the ultimate truth is actually to see beyond that, to see into, to experience these different fields of consciousness. And that means that when you look at compassion from an evolutionary point of view, we're going to be looking at the evolutionary aspects of it in a moment. But when you look at it from a contemplated view, it's wanting to train the mind in order for the mind to have certain types of experiences. So such as non duality, interconnectedness and so on. So the problem with it is, is that the mind certainly has, the brain certainly has a whole range of systems in it which are great for generating compassion and love. And if you think about how parents love their children and all of that, that's wonderful stuff. The trouble is the same brain has the capacities for some terrible things, some really bad stuff. And this is because compassion, because brains are really concerned with two things. Oh, I should also mention however, on the other side, on the green side, because there is no distinction between subject and object, this concept of non duality, this idea that there can be self and other, that beyond self and other just doesn't make any sense because everything is part of you and you're part of everything. And there's a lovely set of studies done on things like, you know, self transcendence. And when people have these self transcendent experiences, they tend to have these feelings like, you know, I feel one with part of the trees. I exalted in the fear, existence I knew well, the satisfaction of losing myself, supreme power of love and I lost the boundary between my physical self. And then Jill Taylor, who was a neurologist, had a stroke on the left side and began to experience just being part of the these energy fields of existence. So the point about it is then that those, when the mind is orientated or creates patterns that allow us to experience these domains of consciousness, what comes out of that experience is this extraordinary experience of self transcendence, the separate dissolving of an ego self and this wonderful feeling of interconnected which people talk about as love. Although I've done some, I've done been part of a documentary looking at people who have these experiences and, and they say it's not really love, it's more like extraordinary bliss state. But love is the only word we have to use. But it's not like I love you, you love me. Okay, so very quickly now, let's have a look at some of the insights into the evolved brain. Because the evolved brain is the problem. Basically, your brain has evolved as like all brains, all physical systems have evolved for survival and reproduction. And that gives rise to what we call the three challenges of life. All living things have to protect themselves. All living things have to be able to find resources. All living things have to be able to move into homeostatic states at some point. Because if you're always just running around achieving things or running away from lions, sooner or later you burn out. So all living things need to come into a state of homeostasis. And in order to do that, we have four functions of mind. So there are two challenges, okay, three tasks and four functions. And that means we have to be motivated, we have to have emotions, we have competencies and behaviors. And that's basically, that's basically in a nutshell, your evolved mind, right? And the key thing is not to confuse those. For example, compassion is a motive, empathy is a competency. And you can use empathy in many kinds of motives, right, but. And empathy is very important for compassion, as we'll see. Now the issue is then that if on the other hand, you have trauma, that's going to impact the organization of your mind. Whereas if you have compassion, that's going to impact the organization of your mind. So the key issue then is compassion has a massive impact on the organizations of mind. It organizes these processes, it organizes how we deal with threat, it organizes how we go about achieving things and doing things. And it organizes how we settle the body and settle the mind. Now this is important because this compassion is great, but there are many inhibitors to it. And one of the reasons for that is because of this little problem to do with constraint. Now, what this means is that things like compassion, from an evil illusionary point of view, are quite expensive. And so you only dispense them to individuals who you're going to relate to. And there's quite a lot of data now coming out that you look at a hormone called oxytocin, which is great for bonding. You know, it helps mom and baby bond together. It's a source of love and all of that. That's wonderful. But the same hormone can actually make you more aggressive and more hating of outsiders, particularly those individuals who might threaten you. Okay, so this is why Zening talked about it in terms of befriend and defend as the title they used. So this is really important that we begin to see that we have to make distinctions between in group and out group. And that title that Rick came up with, extremely important. Because the way you create compassion for ink group and people you love is very different from how you create compassion for people you're not so keen on and indeed people you may hate. And the problem with that is that tribalism gives rise to this, and tribalism also gives rise to this. We have the potential to be an incredibly vicious species. If you look at the last few thousand years, we've done a lot of that. And yet we also have the capacity to be that. Okay, so the question is we have a lot of that, a lot of inhibitors. And so one of the things that we need to be thinking about is how we deal with our inhibitors. Because when you move into the contemplative traditions, there are no inhibitors because there is no separation between self and other. So that's basically a rough framework for you. I'm sorry it's been so quick, but I'm now going to hand over to the Tara, who's much more aware and has an amazing amount of work on the meditative states and how we create states of mind by practicing compassion focusing to get the mind into a position where it can have these experiences.
- [14:09]
B
Maybe. First off, thank you. Thank you, Paul. And I'm. I've been lucky to have a chance to scan through and just feel all of you here. And it feels like such a poignant time to be gathering around this. I mean, I just want a name. Here we are with this war that we see. No way. We don't know what's going to happen. And if there's ever been a time that it's so urgent that we look deeply into what Paul's teaching about, which is can we understand Both the power of compassion and also all the ways that it actually is inhibited, like how this tricky mind gets in the way. And one of my favorite little stories about one Buddhist teacher described he was talking about the difference between illness and wellness, and he wrote the words on a poster in big block letters, and he circled I for illness and we for wellness. And so much from a Buddhist perspective comes down to the stickiness of this sense of a self, a separate self that we identify with. And so much of the freedom comes when we use awareness to start sensing what's beyond that sense of separateness, so that we could actually be here together right now and have some sense of a field of awakeness that that connects us. So I want to name a few parts of Buddhist psychology that help us to shine a light on the ways we get stuck in Iing and mying and caught in that tricky mind. That is also tricky when it's we, but it's a limited we, an in group we. And the first, as I'm mentioning, is this primordial clench of thinking we're separate, of feeling we're separate, because with that clench, we immediately feel vulnerable. And then we have to go and act to defend and enhance ourselves. Typically, that goes with conflict right into that perception of a bad other, which I'm going to come back to. The second teaching I want to name is what the Buddhists call papancha, which is once we have that vulnerability and then the reactivity, like making another wrong, this mind, and we know it in our lives, start circling with stories that actually, you know, rehearsing what the person did, exaggerating their intentions, building the narrative of wrongness. And in our larger society, I think of our social media as papancha machines, you know what I mean? That they're constantly fueling narratives that intensify conflict and division. The third teaching is about attention. There's that saying that where attention goes, energy flows. So if we're in conflict, we start paying attention. Where's my energy flowing? Because if it keeps going back to what's wrong with another, we become habituated to being identified as that separate self that's in conflict. So just to take a moment and say, if you have in your personal life a conflict that doesn't seem like it's going away, and you want to take these basic teachings from Buddhist psychology and look at how you're creating separation, you can ask these questions, you know, what story about this person is my mind repeating? What am I attending to that keeps the conflict alive? And then the Deeper one. What vulnerability in me am I trying to protect or not feel? So let me just say that we're going to come back to this, but I want to touch on some of what Paul talked about, about kind of a different. A metaphysics difference in how evolution and science will look at consciousness and in Buddhism, the nature of reality, that awareness is intrinsic to existence itself. Compassion is a natural expression of that living awareness. And there's a story that I want to just remind you of that helps us to sense the power of that perception of awareness and compassion as intrinsic, not something that is added on over time. And it comes from Thailand, where for centuries there was this large Buddha statue that appeared to be made of clay. But during a drought, these cracks formed, and the monk shined a flashlight inside, and they saw something gleaming. And when they carefully chipped away, the clay they found underneath was solid gold. So historians and the monks believed that it had been covered over with clay to protect it through dangerous times. Just as we cover over our innate purity or goodness, to protect us with those protective strategies that Paul described. Where we are, you know, the fears and the aggressions and the defenses to protect us. And they serve for a while. They serve for a while, but then they create suffering. Because here's the real suffering. We get identified with the coverings, with the ways we're defending and protecting ourselves. And we forget the gold. We forget that primordial awareness, tenderness, sensitivity, caring, love. That's our essence. So Buddhism basically teaches that through both evolution and through our lives, evolution of the species, that experience of suffering begins to crack open the clay. It calls forward. It calls forward and motivates us to cultivate the compassion and the mindfulness that's already here. And I want to pause and go slow here and say, here's why that matters. Here's why it matters. And I'm speaking personally because I've seen it in myself, I've seen it in other practitioners. I've read from mystics, through all the traditions. As our practice deepens, and I suspect, you know this, we start trusting the gold more and more as our essence. And that trust is huge. If we want to really be wholehearted about continuing to cultivate compassion, especially when we're in conflict, when those primitive survival energies, when we're in conflict, rise up, there's some wisdom that remembers. These are coverings. They don't define me, they don't define you. There is spirit awareness, love, something more intrinsic, and then we dedicate to that. So this is what the Buddhists call true nature. Our true home, that shared belonging, our capacity to care. And the more we trust it, the more, even in times like we're in right now, we will have the courage, what I sometimes think of as spiritual audacity, to keep turning towards compassion. So I think that's enough for me right now, Paul, is you're going to take a deeper dive into ways of working with some of the blocks to compassion and bringing compassion forth.
- [22:08]
A
Yes. Thank you so much for that, Tara. And it dovetails very nicely with the evolutionary thing, because the evolutionary thing argues that all living things are built by DNA. No one chose to be what they are. No one choose to be male or female. No one choose to be an elephant or a human. We didn't choose anything. Consciousness is sort of a. Or is sort of flowing through us, as it were. Now, that's important because when we realize that so much of what goes on in our brain is not chosen because we never designed the brain to be the way it is, then when we look at other people, we can say, no, you never chose us either. You didn't choose this either. You didn't wake up one day. So you know what? I could be a compassionate person, but I don't do that. I'm going to be a psychopath. That's emotional fun. No one chooses this. And certainly with our clients, we say to them, no one chooses to wake up in the morning and be suicidally depressed. Depressed. Or have panic attacks. These are potentials within the brain, and they give a terrific amount of suffering. They're the source of immense suffering. And when we look at the people around us, we can see you've been made just like me. You didn't choose to have this, just like me. You didn't choose to suffer just like me. Okay? We're all experiencing these patterns within consciousness. So what Tara says is extremely important. We are connected by the fact that we've all just arrived here and we're trying to censor this tricky brain, which can be great, but it can also be very harsh and painful. So we want to be able to think about compassion. So let's have a little look about how we can use or think about compassion from a biological point of view. So let's think about building a compassion mind. Now, one of the things that's very exciting is we're beginning to understand how the brain actually has evolved to be a very social brain. And because of that, we have a whole range of physiological systems in our brain that are affected by positive relationships, whether we grew up in a loving Relationships, or we feel loved with the people around us. We have friends and colleagues and partners and so forth. This is all very good for a whole range of systems in your. On your brain and body, and they create positive emotion states and they create feedback. So you want to be compassionate to other people. On the other hand, if this happens and you get bullied or harmed or whatever, these systems work in a different way and it's not so good. And we also know that when we do this in relationship to ourselves, when we treat ourselves harsh with compassion, with caring, with the sensitivity, with empathy, we're actually also going to be stimulating these systems. But if we treat ourselves, there it is. Negatively critically challenge ourselves. And as Tara says, we get caught up in ego. This is me, me, me, me. I'm afraid it isn't. It's your biological design systems that you got trapped up in. And as Tara says, the thing to do is to pull back from that and become an observer and recognize actually, this is not my true essence. My true essence is what Tara is talking about. That's my true. This is a biological program that's running all these programs, giving me all these experiences, but that's not my true essence. And these biological programs are in everyone. They're in the. Everybody in the world, all the billions of people all have these programs just like me. Okay? And that also then provides us an opportunity for compassion. So what we can do then is we can begin to think. What do we mean by compassion? Well, the compassion is understood as a motive. Now, all motives have what we call stimulus and response. So, like threat. You see something like a lion, and that stimulates your body to run away. Or you're hungry and you see food that stimulates your brain to give you saliva and make your stomach acids. If A do B. Now, for compassion, it's. If there's a detection of suffering and need, then you engage. So the first thing is to be compassionate is to pay attention. And again, Tara talked about that. Pay attention to notice. Because if you turn away and you're not interested, that's the end of the compassion story, isn't it? But the second thing is to have a response. And these are. These are quite different, and they work differently in the brain. You must distinguish between them. And both of them require courage and wisdom. Because without courage, you're not going to engage. You're going to turn away. You're going to feel too overwhelmed by it all. And without wisdom, you're just going to be reckless. You know, if I see somebody fall into the river And I think I must help them. So I jump in and. But I can't swim. That's not so good. And one of the key elements in the Buddhist traditions is enlightenment. You practice because you want to become enlightened in order to enlighten others. In other words, it's not about rushing around trying to be nice to everybody and kind to everybody. That's okay. But really, why do you want your brain to understand and develop compassion? Because it enables you to be much wiser and more courageous in how you are compassionate to yourself and others. So courage and wisdom are at the center of compassion. And this is why I think compassion is the most important, the most fundamental, the most courageous, the wisest of all human motives. There is no other motive like compassion. Competitiveness won't do it for you. Sexual motives won't do it for you. Eating motors won't do it for you. The only one that will address suffering and address the issues of the causes of suffering is compassion. That's the motive to do it. Okay, so I think I'm probably going to talk. Stop there. Other than to say that there are lots of different forms of compassion and as well, I don't think they're all one form. So the compassion of a firefighter, for example, who's risked their lives is very different to the compassion of a therapist or a parent or a patient. So again, when we're thinking about compassion, the compassion is the motivation to address suffering and the causes of suffering. And that can be anywhere. And that means people can have different types of compassion, different types of compassionate wisdom. But the point that Tara is saying, there is one overreaching part over rising part, which is compassion is the preparedness to acquire the wisdom to settle the mind, to begin to explore how to separate from the biological tricky stuff that's going on in your brain and begin to have a touch, the sense of the essence of consciousness itself. Now that is a form of compassion that then begins to allow you to have emotional experiences of connectedness in different ways than just relying on oxytocin. So thank you for that. I shall finish there and hand back to Sarah.
- [28:56]
B
Before I go on, I was wondering, Paul, if you might just take a few moments to talk about shame because so much of conflict. So I'm going to be talking a bit about, okay, here you are, you're in the midst of conflict. Shame plays such a huge role in what actually blocks us from having that courage and that clarity. And just, if you could just give us a little bit on evolution and shame, I Think it would be helpful framing?
- [29:28]
A
Yes. Okay, so there are two types of shame. More than two types. One type is what we call external shame, and that's what we feel other people think about us.
- [29:38]
C
So if.
- [29:38]
A
If I think Tara is looking at me and thinking, what is he going on about? I mean, how did they invite him? I mean, goodness me, if I think she has a negative view of me or that I'm doing badly, that we call that external shame. And I'm very focused on what she's thinking about me. Now, there are two responses to that. One is to think, oh, no, people are looking down at me. Oh, dear, oh, no, I must stop, must be quiet. The other one is called humiliation, which is, how dare you criticize me? Bang. You know? So those two responses to external shame are very important. Whether we internalize it and go, oh, gosh, look, isn't this terrible? Or whether we then say, no, you're making me feel bad. I'm going to hurt you for that. That's, you know, eventually. Then the other one is called internal shame. And that's not to do what you think about me. You might think I'm wonderful. I think I'm terrible. I think I'm awful. I think if you really knew about me, Tara, you wouldn't like me. You would reject me. That's internal shame, where the sense of the self feels unlovable and unwanted. And the point that Sarah's making is a very important point. The key thing about that experience is loneliness. The key thing about shame, there you are alone. You are disconnected. You will not be wanted. You will be an outsider. Okay? When people feel shame, that overwhelming sense of not only being bad and inferior, but being terribly, terribly alone. And one of the ways in which people heal shame is they feel a sense of connectedness, maybe through the therapist or whatever they feel. Actually, even though this or that or whatever it is that you're ashamed of, this person still connects to me. This still cares about me. And that's important because when you engage in some of the practices that Tara is suggesting, that's the experience. You can begin to see that it's not personal. It's not about you being bad. That's you getting caught up in ego stuff. But actually, you are already part of the. You can't be separated. It's just, you know, you can't be because you are part of it or it's part of you. So those kinds of experience are very important. So distinguished external worries about what other people are thinking about you and how you become Defensive, but then how you feel about yourself and that sense, deep sense of aloneness and unlovability that is paralyzing, as Tara says.
- [31:59]
B
I appreciate you sharing that because we're seeing so much violence in the society and much can be tracked down to humiliation. And it's a practice to learn to see shame because shame is so painful that we do all these things to not feel it. And yet once you start catching on, oh, okay, that's shame in some way. I feel I've been demoted. I feel put down. I feel badness. And maybe it plays into what Paul was describing as that undercurrent of I'm bad anyway, in my own mind, then we can start seeing how when we get angry at others, that is one possible vulnerability deep down, that if we don't pay attention to, it'll keep us hooked in conflict for our lifetime. So what I'm going to do is invite you to choose a place of conflict in your personal life, one that's not traumatic. And just to start considering that I'm going to speak a little and then guide a short meditation, one that you probably have to do on your own for a longer period of time if you want to go deeper. But what I want to start with and say is that a big question comes that when we're in conflict with someone, isn't it dangerous to be compassionate? Won't that set us up for more harm? Many, many people ask me about that. And I want to say that the kind of compassion, mature compassion, that Paul has been speaking of is a commitment to alleviate and prevent suffering for all. And it's not passive, it's not a green light. Think of it as yin yang or Joan Halifax, as strong back, soft front, that we speak from truth. We have the courage and the clarity to speak from truth and to discern what's causing harm. That there's the wisdom to set the boundaries that make sense and rules and, you know, societal level, laws and soft front. We still have a tender heart. We're still inclusive. And I don't want to pretend this is simple. It's a life path. Another underlying question is what motivates us when we're in conflict? Anger is so addictive, we know it right. That it's addictive. It's very powerful. We feel more powerful. Our mind tells us the other is bad or wrong, and we believe it. And I just want to circle back here and say that when we start deepening attention, we can sense that if I live my whole life with this sense of bad othering, this clench in my heart, my heart armored. I'm never going to be inhabiting my potential, my potential to live and love fully. We know that. My friend Ruth King says anger is initiatory. It's not transformational. In other words, we need it, it's intelligent, it energizes us. But we need to wake up out of the trance of anger, of self and other, us and them if we want to act from a place that's transformational. And I remember learning a lot about this. We were when the United States was approaching the invasion of Iraq and I'm thinking of that because of Iran right now. I felt this huge anger and aversion towards political leaders for pushing the war and then was reflecting on what the Buddhists say, which is hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. So I started turning inward. Instead of bad othering, this has just become a life commitment for me. Instead of bad othering, my commitment is to pause and turn inward. And it's sometimes really hard because bad othering feels better, as I mentioned. But when I did that, when I was with this anger about Iraq, I felt all the fear underneath it, all the powerlessness underneath it that the suffering that would unfold. And I found such grieving for what was going to happen. And that opened me up to care. And I'm sharing this with you because when I could act from care, much more powerful, much more healing. Under anger, under conflict, there's always vulnerability. And if we go deep down, there's something we care about and if we can get in touch with the care, then we can bring that wisdom and courage that Paul talked about to creating a better future, a better relationship. We can see that others aren't an enemy. Humans are not the enemy. As Paul described, we get trapped in biological systems playing out humans are not the enemy. But if we think they are, we get waylaid. As one phrase says it, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. We get waylaid. We don't pay attention to what really needs attention. We don't get down to the love and the compassion that can actually guide us. So now I want to go into the actual trainings that help us to shift from the trance, because it's a trance. It's a clench of anger and vengeance and blame into that open heartedness and wisdom of compassion. And it really comes down to, and Rick started right in with this. It comes down to vulnerability, this willingness to not feel comfortable for the sake of truth, for the sake of evolving, for the sake of wholeness. John Paul Lederick, who I very much admire, talks about moral imagination, that we can imagine the vulnerability in others, even if we can't immediately sense it. We can start imagining it and we do whatever we can to have the proximity with whoever we're bad othering so we can actually get the felt sense, oh, human like me. Because as long as there's distance and we're not paying attention, they can be a bad other. And I say this because just this morning I was listening to the stories of some people in parent circle, which is a group of Palestinian and Israelis who've all of them have lost children. And one was describing being locked in hate and anger, you know, bad othering until she was with that circle and she looked into the eyes of another woman who had also lost her child, and they could weep together. They could feel that shared space of the broken heart. So vulnerability is key. We have to feel the vulnerability. It opens naturally into tenderness. And we have to act as John said. When Paul was speaking, he talked about action as an integral part of compassion. And I want to emphasize that, that it's not just having kind feelings. It's engaging in some direct way to bring healing. And the last piece of training is to widen circles, to actually sense wider and wider circles of those that belong. So with that, I want to invite you to take a few breaths and let your attention go inward. Just notice what's here right now. Let the breath help collect your attention. And just for this short time, exploring what it means to bring awareness or superpower to a place of conflict. And you might bring some place into mind again, not where there's major hostility or trauma, but where there's distance, where there's anger, perhaps something more that you might tune into and sense your intention as you do this, to deepen understanding and connection. So the beginning of this is to be aware of the situation and sense the inner experience it triggers. You're doing what I call the U turn. So when you're sensing you're bad othering someone, you take a U turn and you sense, well, what is going on inside me? What might I be unwilling to feel? And then just breathe with that, let it be there. You might investigate as you're doing. So what am I believing about this other person or myself? Maybe I'm believing that they're not respecting me. There can be shame under that. They're not loving or caring. They don't really make me special. They don't understand me. Sense what you're believing, but more important, how it makes you feel and if it helps to put your hand on your heart, I find just that gesture can anchor more in the body and just say, how does it make me feel? What's really going on inside me? You might find that underneath there's a few emotions. Maybe under anger there's hurt or there's fear. And you might sense even more deeply, what's the unmet need? What was I hoping for? What did I want that didn't happen? Did you want attention, care, respect, understanding? And then take it the next few moments to offer yourself genuine kindness in whatever way works for you, Just feel your own awake heart, or feel the energy of the Buddha, the Bodhisattvas, or whatever larger field of benevolence you might relate to. Just feel it pouring in so that that vulnerable place is being washed through with care. And notice. Quality of presence that opens up as you deepen attention in these ways, perhaps allowing you to now look at the other person through more clear eyes, more wisdom to sense the conflict and imagine what they might be feeling. What's it like being you? You might ask the question, where does it hurt? What were they hoping for? Was it to feel respected, loved, important, understood? Just feel your own heart becoming more spacious and tender as you sense that person's vulnerability. And you might take a moment to imagine if that person had their needs met, they felt safeness, if they felt care, if they felt belonging, how that gold, the light warmth of their natural being might shine through. And you might sense who you are when you're present and caring towards another. Who are you really? So you can sense the gold, your true nature, true heart, Your shared belonging with others. And you might imagine that in widening circles that include all beings, that all beings have that vulnerability, a feeling, separate biological system is reacting. All beings have the coverings and all beings have the luminosity of gold shining through. Spirit. This is rumi out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing. There's a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass. The world is too full to talk about ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Thank you, friends. Please feel free to take a few full breaths, open your eyes, and we'll continue on together.
- [46:04]
C
I'm very struck by separation and joining. What I mean by that is I'm really struck by the combination of our true nature and also our biologically true nature, as Paul has taught, of caring and sharing in our small groups. You know, that's kind of our resting state. That's our home. That's where we come home. I think, Tara, I first heard this from you, that the root of all sickness is homeschooling sickness. I really appreciate your practice there and bringing us home. And, Paul, your own guidance, you know, including in your manner, just how you are as a person. Paul, you know, to bring us home here and we have these challenges, we need to see clearly, you know, the root of suffering, arguably, deep down, whether it's scientific or, you know, contemplative, is ignorance, delusion, not seeing clearly and seeing clearly our vulnerabilities, the ways in which, as very social primates, we can be really easily triggered. You can do first the sense of separation, as you said there, Tara, and Paul, too, which then becomes. Opens the gate, opens the door very rapidly to feelings and views of grievance, hostility, vengeance, payback, cruelty, callousness, cruelty, and atrocities of one kind or another. I mean, we're vulnerable, including with our roommates or family. I did that practice myself on a family member I care immensely for, with whom there's a history of conflict. What do we do about that? So, anyway, I want to really thank you for the bringing together of these two traditions, really a scientific, clinical, psychological tradition, and also a contemplative tradition, particularly the one that the three of us are, I think, most deeply trained in, the Buddhist contemplative tradition, not to push any of these traditions, but just to draw upon them. So we're bringing those together, even as we also bring together, if you will, us and them, and how do we navigate all that? So I want to thank you for all that in a kind of home stretch here.
- [48:17]
A
Right.
- [48:18]
C
I'm very interested in what either of you would want to say to the other or ask of the other, and as sort of overarching themes here in a way, since we've kind of explored a fair amount of the bad news. What about the good news, you know, what is the role of joy and emotionally positive experiences in all this? And what gives you hope, you know, in these times of great promise and yet great peril? So take it away. What would either of you like to say with or for each other?
- [48:53]
A
All right. I very much enjoyed the practice. And just to follow on what Tara was saying, I mean, the fact is, all biological life is based on conflict. Everything is about conflict. They're predator, prey. Your viruses will come and kill you in order to reproduce themselves, and so on and so on. So conflict is really inherent in the life process. And therefore, it's about understanding that and not taking it personally. And it's Very important when we come to things like anger and hatred, because they're biological creations. They've existed in minds for thousands and millions of years, probably. But it is important, as Tara says, not to get caught by them. Because, you know, there's an old saying. Beware the power of the dark side, Luke, because the dark side is addictive, okay? And the problem with it is our brains are designed that if it's stimulated, we will go for it. So if somebody hurts me, my hatred is triggered. So once their dark side is triggered, they can easily trigger my dark side. And that's not my fault, but it is the way it is. The point is, as Tara is saying, see it actually, hang on a minute. If I go, if I get triggered because they've been triggered. If their hatred has triggered my hatred, gosh, now we're both walking the path of the dark side. And my responsibility is really enlightenment, is to wake up and think, this is all biological stuff. We do not want to go down there because this is a creation of suffering big time. How do we get out of it? And as Tara says, it's very important, therefore, that when we look at some of the aggressive male leaders and aggressive male leaders, believe me, they've been up to mischief for 10,000 years. In longer. If you look at all the Roman empires and how the pharaohs were, you know, what happened in Europe in the 1940s and so on and so on, aggressive male leaders are poisonous. They are poisonous. And if we're going to be compassionate, rather than getting all hating about them as individuals, they're simply doing what life forms have been doing for thousands of years, the compassionate position. What do we do to prevent aggressive males getting into power? That's the most important question of our species. And I know this is something that Rick's interested in because you've talked about getting money out of politics. And so what we can do is to say, okay, I can be angry with all these people. That's right. But actually, they're just doing their thing. They didn't wake up one day and say, I think I'll be a terrorist or whatever. They're just doing their thing. The question is, how can we create context and relationships within ourselves and between each other? We will stop that because at the moment, we are moving away from compassion. We're moving to the right. We're not moving towards compassion. We are, as Tara says, being more infected by fear. And me first. And me. But my country first. My religion is better than yours. My messiah is stronger than yours. This is A poison to humanity. So we can stand back from that and think about how are we going to address it at a social, international level. So, yes, we have to address it within ourselves as well. That's very important. We have to be careful not to get caught up in our hatreds of the other. We have to see this as partly they are socially created. Okay. Partly they're socially allowed. We collectively are allowing these people to get into power. So what can we do? Can we do to stop it? And I think if we put our minds together, not out of hatred, not out of hatred, but out of recognition, this is what we're caught up in. And no one chose it, but we have to take responsibility to do something about it. That, for me, is a mission that I'm very keen on because, as Cyrus says, it's very easy to get into positions where I just hate these people because of the. The suffering they've caused is immense, you know, but that doesn't go anywhere, you know, that just leads to more hatred as opposed to, okay, what are we doing, society, to create the pathways to these people's pathways to power? And how can we stop that?
- [53:00]
C
Tara?
- [53:02]
B
Yeah. Wow, thanks, Paul. I'm with you. That right now. The key important thing is the inner and relational work that wakes up the kind of compassion that can lead us forward. And one of my favorite sayings from Thich Nhat Hanh is that the next Buddha is the Sangha, that it's going to come out of our relationship. If we think we're trying to do the good fight alone, we will end up sinking. So we need to hold hands. I mean, like, if there's any one thing I know we need to do is that we need to feel our belonging and our togetherness. And I am hopeful because there's something in me, and I think it doesn't matter whether it's truth or not. It's pragmatic. I am more energized and happy and available with my heart when I trust a kind of trajectory that might see what's going on now, the contagion of fear, but also look a little bit at a wider swath of history and say, wow. I have never seen anything historically with the number of people who are recognizing, we can evolve our own consciousness. I have never seen anything like it. With the people doing compassion training and meditation training and trauma awareness, it's global. It's global. And if we look through history, the last century, how much there has been a waking up to the intrinsic value and dignity of all beings, it's now explicit. It's many groups of people that are fighting for and standing for that women's group and trans groups and, you know, environmental justice groups and so on. So to me, the hope is we take care of each other, we dedicate to taking care of each other and we don't go it alone. And I'll say one of the great inspirations recently is listening to a YouTube of people in Minneapolis singing. And they'd gone to a church earlier to practice and then they came out 2000 plus singing these songs that were of total compassion and love. They were doing it where ICE agents were in a hotel singing to them, saying, you belong. We're all together, you know, please join us. Let us help to serve each other and the well being of all. There is something going on. It's just taking form. It's an emergent movement that's been here before and nonviolent and compassion based movements in the past. And if we sense it and we in some way, action reduces anxiety. And when we act together out of love, out of compassion, that's the hope for our world. So may we all in some way look in that direction because that's what can possibly bring some healing to where we are.
- [56:15]
A
I think that's just brilliant. Yes. Because it is, as you say, coming together, that sense of togetherness, being together as a care and share. All those that want to do care and share in the world, bring them together. Absolutely. Such an important message because otherwise you can get all very personal and all of that. But it isn't. It's really about actually compassion is in the Sangha. You're so right about that. And we also.
- [56:38]
B
And it's in the joy of it,
- [56:41]
A
the joy of the Sangha. And just one point that Rick is saying, it's like if you look back over the last 300 years or last 500 years, we've come a hell of a long way. You know, we don't have slavery, institutionalized slavery like we used to. We don't have the Roman games anymore. Women have come a long way, not nearly far enough and so on. So all the things that Tara said, we can do this, we can do this. Okay, there's going to be two steps forward, one step back. That's how it goes. But together we can do this because there is an awakening, both on the biological side about what's happening in our minds and how we can get our minds to be compassionate, but also on the spiritual side, also in the area where physicists are telling this consciousness is not Just in the brain, this is fundamentally transformatory. So we're absolutely on this brink. So the sangha is wonderful,
- [57:40]
C
I love that word together. And it seems so central to what we're talking about here. Both to help oneself as individuals, to come together in our own consciousness with no bad parts, undivided with compassion for ourselves. You know, taking into account in our common humanity how we're affected by upstream situation, systemic structural forces that are not our fault and yet land hard on us. So coming together internally and then linking that to coming together as we've come together here, the three of us, and then with Rachel, the four of us, and then hundreds of people here, all of you coming together and really appreciating that as social change occurs, it always occurs through people coming together. To paraphrase, I think Margaret Mead, she said something like, you know, never doubt that a small group of people can change the world initially. That's the only way it's ever been changed. And I think about the ways in which, in our hunter gatherer bands, as you have pointed out, Paul, which is how humans lived our species for 97% of the time. I'm a dork, 290,000 of the last 300,000 years walking this earth with our own tool manufacturing, hominid ancestors. We did it on the basis of compassion and justice. Inside our bands, quite a lot of aggression between bands. But inside the bands, we evolved a unique strategy among hundreds of other primate species to care and to share, caring and sharing. So that really is our deep nature, and that's how we managed to survive in our bands and also to evolve. And that's our opportunity today to find ways to come together, together at, you know, two people, 10 people, 10 million, 2 billion people coming together at scales that are big enough to be strong enough to rebalance the inequities of wealth and power that have accumulated over the last 10,000 years of kind of sort of Game of Thrones. So that's the opportunity here, and that's what your work, each of you, is definitely contributing to. I think it's so important, as you said, Tara, to recognize thousands of other people and groups who've come together to make a better world. And one of the great opportunities in the century is to use modern technologies of different kinds to help these different nodes, these different nodes of compassionate action to come together at even larger and larger scales. And that's the work of the Global Compassion Coalition. And it's to tap into the biological, and I will say it, spiritual, spiritual wellsprings of compassion. To bring us together, to bring people together. And together we can change the world. So thank you for coming together here. Very, very big thank yous and thank everyone here for being part of this. Please check out the work of Tara and Paul and I want to turn it back just to finish here to each of you. Maybe first you, Paul, you know, for a minute, and then Tara and then we'll wrap it up. So, Paul.
- [60:55]
A
Yeah, well, it's been a delight to be part of this in talking with Tara because it is really about. We are on the brink and I think things are quite bad at the moment. But, but, but sometimes you don't know you're sick until you get symptoms. And really I think people are beginning to see we cannot continue like this. We cannot. There's movements in the United nations now. There are these different movements around. There's a lot of grassroots feeling. We can't. And so I'm hoping that this is going to be a wake up call. And when we look back, maybe in two or three or five years, whenever it is, you say we have to do changes, just like the United nations in 1948. If you read the Charter, the Charter of Human Rights, it is an amazing document. It's a wonderful document, Absolutely fantastic. The problem is they set up within it the Security Council, which was always going to undermine it. So we kind of know what we need to do. We've got all of these wonderful Charter of Human Rights, this wonderful document. How to make it happen, how to make it happen, how to control these dominant aggressive males and self interest, that's the big challenge. But I think people are looking to ways of doing that now. So both at the grassroots level and at higher levels of international politics, people that were in behind the scenes are beginning to work out actually we've got to control this stuff, we really do. Otherwise we're done for as a species.
- [62:24]
C
Well, thank you. And Tara.
- [62:27]
B
Yeah. Well, Paul, just as you're saying, it's like that bodhisattva for prayer. May these times of suffering awaken compassion and healing, if that can be our prayer, that may these times awaken. And how can these times awaken? And to know that partly it's that courage to let ourselves feel, because we have to feel and we have to have our hearts broken because there's so much pain and we have to commit to the goodness, to see the light in each other's eyes and to celebrate together. And I'll just say one other thing, which is that authoritarian systems depend on fear. They depend on scarcity. They depend on separation. So don't hold back the joy and the love and the caring, because that is what can really undermine authoritarian regimes. Joy, compassion, care, love. May it be so.
- [63:23]
A
Maybe so. Maybe so.