Seeking What's True (Part I)
Seeking What's True (Part I)
After listening to Part 3 of Tara Brach's "Seeking What's True Part" yesterday morning, I decided I wanted to to start from the beginning with Part 1 - studying it, taking notes and sharing it with anyone willing to read about it. I'll do this with Part 2 and Part 3.
I listened, and wrote some notes. Some in my words and some exactly how Tara spoke them.
https://www.tarabrach.com/seeking-whats-true/
Part 1
Lily Tomlin: "Self knowledge is not necessarily good news."
When we are able to recognize and be in our civilized personas, we recognize our reptilian tendencies. The aggression, the fear. We can become disgusted by aggressiveness, but find joy in the opportunity to getting real.
A freedom comes with having an increasing sense of whats true. No need to hide or pretend, but live in a wholeness.
Self Honesty. How do we cultivate this capacity to be real with ourselves?
Capacity to recognize whats going on inside of us. Recognizing the unconscious patterning, without judgement or interpreting.
Challenge is to develop the capacity to bare witness in an engaged and direct way with the life that is here without adding on our habitual judgement and interpretation.
To see clearly, to feel directly, to listen deeply.
Clean contact with truth.
Why is self honesty so important? Each of us have a longing for it. Our only refuge is reality.
Joseph Campbell's circle.
A circle of awareness with a line across.
Below the line is the unconscious, and above it what we are aware of.
Not paying attention to below the line, ends up ruling us and affects our decisions and how we relate to each other. Gives us the core sense of our "small separate self." They can control our experience without our intention. Thats why self honesty is so important. As you begin to shine the light of awareness on what has been part of below the line, sense of being becomes more enlarged.
Inhabit the natural fullness of who you are. Which means you get to draw on the awakened heart and mind, the wisdom and love that are always there and not always accessible.
See it in terms of responsibility. The more we can recognize, the more we can be responsible to ourselves in this world.
When things are below the line our reactions are automatic, we are not able to be responsible for it. We react out of it, become defensive and bring on patterns of the things we do not like.
When we are aware, we can be responsible, and respond to the wounded places in us and break the pattern.
Your future depends on how honest you are this moment with the life thats inside you.
We become more wise with that movement from below the line to above the line.
Our future comes from this moment from our capacity to get real.
Look below the line, without judgement.
What makes it transformational. Whats below the line isn't personal. Part of evolutionary inheritance. Fears and aggressions are in our nervous systems.
Shine light of awareness. We recognize this tendency to create harm here, and harm there.
In the sharing of this with otheres, there is a recognition - it is OUR addictiveness, and OUR tendency to blame. Not just MY.
Release of difficult truths ("tooth" Zambia. Tribes healing rituals. tooth = truth)
This practice of self honesty, doesn't work if we judge it. But if we can sense that perspective of shining the sense of awareness, then we can look with more clarity and gentleness and bring some healing.
Thoughts and emotions entrap us. They keep us small. When the heart is open to the light of truth, no secrets, and "demons" cannot craft their delusions.
Part of ritual of self honesty is to bring it to another. They offer space, accepting, and loving space. Process of self knowledge. We are not meant to do it alone.
Opening our heart to the light of truth. Quality of heart and light.
Unconscious patterning, is when you go into trance and reactivity. It just means you're not so conscious.
All the moments of the day, when anxious and tight and defensive - thats whats going on, unconscious patterning.
Under the line patterning, driven of survival brain.
Evolutionary Brain..
Survival brain is wired into us. Reptilian brain - threats, aggression, fear, avoiding harm and danger.
Mammalian brain. Going for reward and pleasure and gratification. That pursuit is a pretty active pursuit that happens every day, if we watch.
Primate brain. Most recent evolutionary part. Securing attachment. Trying to secure our relationships so we can get what we want in this world.
Where are these activated?
Example of Adam and Eve -
Fearful of punishment (reptilian), screw up relationship with God (mammalian leads to shame and guilt). Tara points out that if only they were able to pause and meditate and say "hey we weren't conscious of this" they may not have felt like they got kicked out of the garden. It would have saved us a millennia from the trance of separation and unworthiness.
Reflection
Part 1
Fear of pain, physiological fear to get kicked out of "tribe."
Reptilian. The obsessing, worrying, self judging, insecurity, and fear. Where we blame others (aggression).
Take a moment to sense of either today or yesterday and looking how deep part of our nervous system is playing into this particular heart mind. You might fall short? Physical symptom might be more serious? Something is about to go wrong? Sense of something around the corner is too much to handle. Thats the reptilian brain clutching. Often below the line, we are busy spinning in our thoughts. In that fear - Whats your sense of yourself? Recognize it, below the line, shine the light of awareness.
"Op! Oh theres my reptilian brain" is a good way to indentify with sense of perspective and humor. Rather then "the terrible implications on my goodness."
Mammalian brain. Again, seeking rewards of physical, food, comfort, sex, whatever. Emotional rewards of buying something that we are really wanting. Having more beauty. Different kinds of reward, money? It is our grasping. It takes place in wanting to win something or over consuming. Being in some way addicted or attached to having more of what we want. Seeking reward, gratification, pleasure - how much was it driving your behaviors or thoughts?
Wanting to accumulate, wanting win something or prove yourself in some way. Sense these are below the line energies. And what is it like when you are caught in them. Sense of experiencing your own being. Notice when you are caught in seeking reward or addiction or attachment or pleasure, and also how quickly shame comes with that.
Yet, it's just the mammalian brain. With unmet needs, the stronger the drive is. It is not our fault.
Primate brain. Trying to secure attachments. Again, the more insecure we are and the more unmet needs of having a real sense of belonging.. the more we are going to see the primate strategies to get attention and approval. We do this to avoid of being seen of being rejected. There is more fixation. In some ways it is people pleasing, being accommodating, and trying to show people what they want.
Franklin Roosevelt complained that no one paid attention to what he said. Made an experiment, and murmured "I murdered my grandmother this morning" to everyone and got responses like "marvelous!" "good work!" "god bless you sir!" LOL. Later, he was greeting the ambassador from Bolivia who actually listened to his words, and he whispered back "I'm sure she had it coming to her." (That cracked me up).
Notice within ourselves about doing something unconsciously in the last day or so - behaviors that come from our unmet needs for secure attachment. Ways we might pretend, lie or exaggerate, withdraw or be defensive. Ways to get others to depend on us. Try to get approval. Notice yourself where that seeking of attachment is, the primate brain is activated. Might have been unconscious. What is the sense of your own self when you're in it? Whenever we are in a trance, and below the line, the self sense is confined and usually the self is not liking itself. It is the suffering of not seeing, being caught below the line, and not honestly recognizing whats going on. We forget who we really are. We are caught off from the awareness or heart that we have. Whats unseen or unfelt (below the line) creates experience of the false self, its not a bad thing, its just not the truth of who we are. We are living in a smaller identity.
Way to wake up. Practices to reconnect.
How to shine the light of awareness in what we haven't been paying attention to?
Elizabeth Lesser.
My prayer to God every day: remove the veils, so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
It is really, let me see the truth so I'm not caught in the trance.
I really need to get real. Need to get real, getting real with thats corroding my life.
RAIN. Works for sense of awareness.
Recognize - reactivity, its just happening
Allow - allow it, was getting triggered
Investigation - making a U-turn, wherever you have been fixating, you ask "what is really happening inside me?" Movement of taking responsibility. Naming.
Nurture.
Getting real, give hope. If you can include it all, we can deal with it. We can't deal with it if we can't include it.
Matter of flexibility.
"Ok its the reptilian brain, angry, aggressive... primate self, we want attachments to be good"
That perspective helps allow to respond with more heart, intelligence, and a lot less reactivity.
Steps of self-honesty.
When you're stuck in a pattern thats causing pain - You got below the line stuff to pay attention to.
It motivates you to remove the veil.
Don't blame yourself, create some space, investigate and make the U-turn.
Feel in the body, and ask what is really going on?
The aversion, hatred, and fear - that stuff is in our bodies.
Call on as much love and care as you can to hold the investigation. Invite it to be a big as it is. Because if there is no loving presence that you call in, you won't be able to see clearly the truth. There won't be enough space, softness, gentleness for it.
The nurturing is critical. Opening the heart to the light of the truth.
Remember : Guilt makes you not fully there.
Love is the most basic container for whats going on.
The times that below the line energies start controlling us, they come from deep unmet needs (places of being abused and violated). We can't do the U-turn, or let the heart open to the light of truth. We don't have enough of a container of tolerance and wisdom, the wisdom and compassion that self honesty has its own organic timing.
To long to pull the veils, let that longing guide you, but still know that there is a patience and timing that you can't will it.
We often need support in the process of shining the light. Meditation, Therapy.. nurture and then shine the light.
The more we practice shining the light of awareness, the more we trust that we are ready for what wants to unfold itself.
The heart that is ready for anything. Creates an amazing source of confidence.
Of course we have layered in there all sorts of raw and intense emotions. But having a self awareness can keep transforming what is seen.
Be in a larger space of wisdom of compassion.
When we trust awareness we can then engage in the process of self honesty and really know we are in a path of freedom.
If we don't face what's under there - there is more shame (i.e. Eden). Continue to have an instinctual sense that something is wrong.
It's a path. The more longing we have to remove the veil. The more that we are courageous in it, the more we can actually get to feel that sense of freedom with coming in contact with what is real.
Make that U-turn, and thn what am I unwilling to feel?
Stuck in a pattern of reactivity?
Is it a sense of shame?
Fear of failure?
Fear of hurt?
Fear of something being too much?
Without figuring it out much, feel that uneasiness. As you do, bring that nurturing in. Opening the heart to the light of the truth. Simplicity of intending to see whats here without judgement.
Opening the heart to the light of the truth.
Gentle. Kind.
You know its getting real because there you will feel a shift. And more of you begins to be freed up to rest in presence.
Rest in the kindness and the awakeness of your awareness. Not so identified.
Send that message inward of your dedication to keep on drawing the veil, seeing whats true and opening your heart to the light of what is true.
In doing so you're holding the hands of many beings who want to wake up or evolve their consciousness, so actions of this world come from a more awake, wise, and loving heart.
After listening to Part 3 of Tara Brach's "Seeking What's True Part" yesterday morning, I decided I wanted to to start from the beginning with Part 1 - studying it, taking notes and sharing it with anyone willing to read about it. I'll do this with Part 2 and Part 3.
I listened, and wrote some notes. Some in my words and some exactly how Tara spoke them.
https://www.tarabrach.com/seeking-whats-true/
Part 1
Lily Tomlin: "Self knowledge is not necessarily good news."
When we are able to recognize and be in our civilized personas, we recognize our reptilian tendencies. The aggression, the fear. We can become disgusted by aggressiveness, but find joy in the opportunity to getting real.
A freedom comes with having an increasing sense of whats true. No need to hide or pretend, but live in a wholeness.
Self Honesty. How do we cultivate this capacity to be real with ourselves?
Capacity to recognize whats going on inside of us. Recognizing the unconscious patterning, without judgement or interpreting.
Challenge is to develop the capacity to bare witness in an engaged and direct way with the life that is here without adding on our habitual judgement and interpretation.
To see clearly, to feel directly, to listen deeply.
Clean contact with truth.
Why is self honesty so important? Each of us have a longing for it. Our only refuge is reality.
Joseph Campbell's circle.
A circle of awareness with a line across.
Below the line is the unconscious, and above it what we are aware of.
Not paying attention to below the line, ends up ruling us and affects our decisions and how we relate to each other. Gives us the core sense of our "small separate self." They can control our experience without our intention. Thats why self honesty is so important. As you begin to shine the light of awareness on what has been part of below the line, sense of being becomes more enlarged.
Inhabit the natural fullness of who you are. Which means you get to draw on the awakened heart and mind, the wisdom and love that are always there and not always accessible.
See it in terms of responsibility. The more we can recognize, the more we can be responsible to ourselves in this world.
When things are below the line our reactions are automatic, we are not able to be responsible for it. We react out of it, become defensive and bring on patterns of the things we do not like.
When we are aware, we can be responsible, and respond to the wounded places in us and break the pattern.
Your future depends on how honest you are this moment with the life thats inside you.
We become more wise with that movement from below the line to above the line.
Our future comes from this moment from our capacity to get real.
Look below the line, without judgement.
What makes it transformational. Whats below the line isn't personal. Part of evolutionary inheritance. Fears and aggressions are in our nervous systems.
Shine light of awareness. We recognize this tendency to create harm here, and harm there.
In the sharing of this with otheres, there is a recognition - it is OUR addictiveness, and OUR tendency to blame. Not just MY.
Release of difficult truths ("tooth" Zambia. Tribes healing rituals. tooth = truth)
This practice of self honesty, doesn't work if we judge it. But if we can sense that perspective of shining the sense of awareness, then we can look with more clarity and gentleness and bring some healing.
Thoughts and emotions entrap us. They keep us small. When the heart is open to the light of truth, no secrets, and "demons" cannot craft their delusions.
Part of ritual of self honesty is to bring it to another. They offer space, accepting, and loving space. Process of self knowledge. We are not meant to do it alone.
Opening our heart to the light of truth. Quality of heart and light.
Unconscious patterning, is when you go into trance and reactivity. It just means you're not so conscious.
All the moments of the day, when anxious and tight and defensive - thats whats going on, unconscious patterning.
Under the line patterning, driven of survival brain.
Evolutionary Brain..
Survival brain is wired into us. Reptilian brain - threats, aggression, fear, avoiding harm and danger.
Mammalian brain. Going for reward and pleasure and gratification. That pursuit is a pretty active pursuit that happens every day, if we watch.
Primate brain. Most recent evolutionary part. Securing attachment. Trying to secure our relationships so we can get what we want in this world.
Where are these activated?
Example of Adam and Eve -
Fearful of punishment (reptilian), screw up relationship with God (mammalian leads to shame and guilt). Tara points out that if only they were able to pause and meditate and say "hey we weren't conscious of this" they may not have felt like they got kicked out of the garden. It would have saved us a millennia from the trance of separation and unworthiness.
Reflection
Part 1
Fear of pain, physiological fear to get kicked out of "tribe."
Reptilian. The obsessing, worrying, self judging, insecurity, and fear. Where we blame others (aggression).
Take a moment to sense of either today or yesterday and looking how deep part of our nervous system is playing into this particular heart mind. You might fall short? Physical symptom might be more serious? Something is about to go wrong? Sense of something around the corner is too much to handle. Thats the reptilian brain clutching. Often below the line, we are busy spinning in our thoughts. In that fear - Whats your sense of yourself? Recognize it, below the line, shine the light of awareness.
"Op! Oh theres my reptilian brain" is a good way to indentify with sense of perspective and humor. Rather then "the terrible implications on my goodness."
Mammalian brain. Again, seeking rewards of physical, food, comfort, sex, whatever. Emotional rewards of buying something that we are really wanting. Having more beauty. Different kinds of reward, money? It is our grasping. It takes place in wanting to win something or over consuming. Being in some way addicted or attached to having more of what we want. Seeking reward, gratification, pleasure - how much was it driving your behaviors or thoughts?
Wanting to accumulate, wanting win something or prove yourself in some way. Sense these are below the line energies. And what is it like when you are caught in them. Sense of experiencing your own being. Notice when you are caught in seeking reward or addiction or attachment or pleasure, and also how quickly shame comes with that.
Yet, it's just the mammalian brain. With unmet needs, the stronger the drive is. It is not our fault.
Primate brain. Trying to secure attachments. Again, the more insecure we are and the more unmet needs of having a real sense of belonging.. the more we are going to see the primate strategies to get attention and approval. We do this to avoid of being seen of being rejected. There is more fixation. In some ways it is people pleasing, being accommodating, and trying to show people what they want.
Franklin Roosevelt complained that no one paid attention to what he said. Made an experiment, and murmured "I murdered my grandmother this morning" to everyone and got responses like "marvelous!" "good work!" "god bless you sir!" LOL. Later, he was greeting the ambassador from Bolivia who actually listened to his words, and he whispered back "I'm sure she had it coming to her." (That cracked me up).
Notice within ourselves about doing something unconsciously in the last day or so - behaviors that come from our unmet needs for secure attachment. Ways we might pretend, lie or exaggerate, withdraw or be defensive. Ways to get others to depend on us. Try to get approval. Notice yourself where that seeking of attachment is, the primate brain is activated. Might have been unconscious. What is the sense of your own self when you're in it? Whenever we are in a trance, and below the line, the self sense is confined and usually the self is not liking itself. It is the suffering of not seeing, being caught below the line, and not honestly recognizing whats going on. We forget who we really are. We are caught off from the awareness or heart that we have. Whats unseen or unfelt (below the line) creates experience of the false self, its not a bad thing, its just not the truth of who we are. We are living in a smaller identity.
Way to wake up. Practices to reconnect.
How to shine the light of awareness in what we haven't been paying attention to?
Elizabeth Lesser.
My prayer to God every day: remove the veils, so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
It is really, let me see the truth so I'm not caught in the trance.
I really need to get real. Need to get real, getting real with thats corroding my life.
RAIN. Works for sense of awareness.
Recognize - reactivity, its just happening
Allow - allow it, was getting triggered
Investigation - making a U-turn, wherever you have been fixating, you ask "what is really happening inside me?" Movement of taking responsibility. Naming.
Nurture.
Getting real, give hope. If you can include it all, we can deal with it. We can't deal with it if we can't include it.
Matter of flexibility.
"Ok its the reptilian brain, angry, aggressive... primate self, we want attachments to be good"
That perspective helps allow to respond with more heart, intelligence, and a lot less reactivity.
Steps of self-honesty.
When you're stuck in a pattern thats causing pain - You got below the line stuff to pay attention to.
It motivates you to remove the veil.
Don't blame yourself, create some space, investigate and make the U-turn.
Feel in the body, and ask what is really going on?
The aversion, hatred, and fear - that stuff is in our bodies.
Call on as much love and care as you can to hold the investigation. Invite it to be a big as it is. Because if there is no loving presence that you call in, you won't be able to see clearly the truth. There won't be enough space, softness, gentleness for it.
The nurturing is critical. Opening the heart to the light of the truth.
Remember : Guilt makes you not fully there.
Love is the most basic container for whats going on.
The times that below the line energies start controlling us, they come from deep unmet needs (places of being abused and violated). We can't do the U-turn, or let the heart open to the light of truth. We don't have enough of a container of tolerance and wisdom, the wisdom and compassion that self honesty has its own organic timing.
To long to pull the veils, let that longing guide you, but still know that there is a patience and timing that you can't will it.
We often need support in the process of shining the light. Meditation, Therapy.. nurture and then shine the light.
The more we practice shining the light of awareness, the more we trust that we are ready for what wants to unfold itself.
The heart that is ready for anything. Creates an amazing source of confidence.
Of course we have layered in there all sorts of raw and intense emotions. But having a self awareness can keep transforming what is seen.
Be in a larger space of wisdom of compassion.
When we trust awareness we can then engage in the process of self honesty and really know we are in a path of freedom.
If we don't face what's under there - there is more shame (i.e. Eden). Continue to have an instinctual sense that something is wrong.
It's a path. The more longing we have to remove the veil. The more that we are courageous in it, the more we can actually get to feel that sense of freedom with coming in contact with what is real.
Make that U-turn, and thn what am I unwilling to feel?
Stuck in a pattern of reactivity?
Is it a sense of shame?
Fear of failure?
Fear of hurt?
Fear of something being too much?
Without figuring it out much, feel that uneasiness. As you do, bring that nurturing in. Opening the heart to the light of the truth. Simplicity of intending to see whats here without judgement.
Opening the heart to the light of the truth.
Gentle. Kind.
You know its getting real because there you will feel a shift. And more of you begins to be freed up to rest in presence.
Rest in the kindness and the awakeness of your awareness. Not so identified.
Send that message inward of your dedication to keep on drawing the veil, seeing whats true and opening your heart to the light of what is true.
In doing so you're holding the hands of many beings who want to wake up or evolve their consciousness, so actions of this world come from a more awake, wise, and loving heart.
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