Tara Brach On The 'Sacred Art of Pausing'

The bestselling author and beloved meditation teacher explains the simple act that can change everything

Today, I'm excited to bring you my conversation with Tara Brach, an internationally recognized meditation teacher, psychologist and bestselling author.

Tara and I had this conversation upon the recent release of the 20th Anniversary edition of her wonderful and essential book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Life With The Buddha. (You do not need to be Buddhist to benefit from Tara's wise teaching).

Many of us are trying to figure out how to navigate our culture's divisiveness broadly and often closer to home. We tend to focus on what other people are doing to upset us. We spend less time looking deep within ourselves to consider how we might respond, rather than react, when faced with difficult situations. I wrote a book about my experience navigating this divide a few years ago. 

To experience 'radical acceptance'—not just of others but also of ourselves—we need to learn to take what Tara calls a 'sacred pause' to create space for empathy and grace, which will change how we experience life both inside and out. We also, Tara says, need to focus on the importance of bridging our inner divides before attempting to bridge outer divides.

You can watch the video of the interview, or I've included the transcript if you prefer to read it. Enjoy!

Kirsten Powers (00:03):

I'm here with Tara Brach, who I think needs no introduction. She's an internationally [recognized] meditation teacher and international bestselling author. She has a new edition of her wonderful book, Radical Acceptance, which I think is something we all could learn a lot about. Tara, thank you so much for being with me today.

Tara Brach (00:27):

Oh, my pleasure, Kirsten. I've been looking forward to it.

Kirsten Powers (00:31):

Well, one of the things that we were talking about before we came on was how you feel that something people don't really grasp is that you need to be able to bridge your inner divide before you can start trying to bridge outer divides.

So could you talk a little bit about that?

Tara Brach (00:48):

Yeah, so I mean the big frame is that if we look at the suffering on our planet, it really comes from that.

We've lost our sense of belonging to each other, and when we lose our sense of belonging to each other, we're also not connected to our inner life.

And the more trauma there is in the world, and there's a lot, we have all these existential threats as we know, the more the survival brain takes over, it hijacks us. So what we're doing is we have a lot of unprocessed fear, and the way it comes out is to make enemies to perceive others as bad to polarize.

And at the same time, we disconnect from ourselves.

When there's unprocessed fear, we disconnect from ourselves. So when we talk about how are we ever going to begin to be in the room together to see the humanity in others, to find our way to more peace on the planet, part of what's required is that humans have a way of sensing within themselves.

As one sage said, the big question is what am I unwilling to feel and to begin to bring the practices I talk about as mindfulness and self-compassion to what we've pushed away.

Kirsten Powers (02:11):

I forgot to mention that you are also a psychologist. Just help us, Tara. Please help us.

Everybody feels like, I think they’d probably love to be able to do what you're talking about, to have self-compassion, to have compassion for other people, including people that they feel are bad or even evil. But how do you do that?

Tara Brach (02:40):

Yeah, well, maybe I'll give you an example again, big picture is it's sometimes as described as the two wings of the bird that need to wake up and fly to freedom. One is the wing of mindfulness, which is the question for mindfulness is what is happening inside me right now?

It's a really useful question. I mean, the more we can pause and say what is happening inside me right now, the more we begin to connect.

And the second question, and this is the wing of compassion, is can I be with this? Can I let this be? Because actually in a moment of accepting what's happening right here, we're actually opening a space for tenderness and care.

So those are the two questions for reconnecting with ourselves. What's happening inside me right now, and can I be with this?

And to give an example, one friend of mine who teaches children, and she's also an activist and very gripped by the violence in this world, and by really her own reaction to it, her own anger and her own feeling of othering people. And so we were talking because we both have a deep sense of Martin Luther King and many others have put it this way. The Buddhist scriptures also that hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law.

So she really didn't want to be part of seeding more anger and hatred. So we practiced together. And the practice is really, again, those questions when she said, well, what is happening inside me right now? She could feel the anger and when she went deeper, she could feel the fear of all the suffering that she could sense was going to proliferate out of this moment in time.

And when she went even deeper than that, Kirsten, she got in touch with her grieving for the world, her care for the world. And so she opened, can I be with this? Can I just let this grieving be here? And when she did that, there was this profound sense of just loving life.

So I'm bringing this up because if we can pause —and I call it the sacred art of pausing—when we're reactive, when we're blaming others, when we're making bad other out there, and kind of do what I call the U-turn and bring attention to our own bodies and hearts, what is happening inside me right now and can I be with that?

The way we start being with that becomes more and more kind for her. When she could feel the grief, she put her hand on her heart, and it was like her spiritual heart was holding her human heart. I mean, there was that sense of real presence. And so then she's able to continue her activism, but not from anger or hatred, from more of a sense of really caring about life. And so I think that's the key when we talk about inner divides and outer divides, is we have to be there for ourselves first.

Kirsten Powers (06:00):

One of the things that I've noticed, and I think I definitely used to be, well, absolutely, I was absolutely this way — where you feel there's the “bad” people, and there's the “good” people. And there certainly are people doing bad things. I think we can all agree on that. And that it's really necessary to basically be…naming the “bad” people. And [we feel] that's the solution to the problem. And that feeling hatred is actually perfectly appropriate because who wouldn't hate people who are causing this kind of harm?

Whereas it sounds like you're talking about something very different, which is you can still do things to change the world [and have radical acceptance]. That's the thing that I discovered is that when you're not completely incapacitated with fear, hatred, all of these other things, there are other things you can do [to rectify the harm]. But I think there are some people who still will be listening to this saying, no, there's no way I could ever feel anything but hatred. What would you say to those people?

Tara Brach (07:12):

Yeah, it's a really good question. And first off, feeling hatred and feeling anger is completely natural, and our nervous systems are designed to have those feelings. And so the first thing to do is to, okay, what's happening inside me? Anger, can I be with this? Let it be there.

It helps if we don't keep fueling it with our narrative though, because the thing, and one of my friends says at the best, Ruth King who wrote Mindful of Race, she says, anger is initiatory. It's not transformational.

We need anger. It initiates, it wakes up our attention. It says, Hey, something here is threatening. Something here is dangerous. I need to do something. But then the question is, how effective are our doings?

And if they're coming from hatred or anger, all they do is create more defensiveness and anger and hatred at wherever they're aimed. If they come from care, we have much more access to our intelligence, much more access.

So the trick is when we're seeing somebody else, and it's not just, ‘oh, you're doing harmful things, but you're a bad person.’ When we have that sense of another is bad, we have to be able to see past the mask, past what all of our interpretations.

I often use this little story for myself and for others. It's just so helpful. If you imagine you're walking in the woods and you see a little dog by a tree and you go to pad it and it lurches at you and its fangs are bared and very aggressive. And so you shift from thinking, oh, nice little dog to anger. And then you realize that the dog has its leg in a trap, and then you shift again, and you might not go so near it because you want to be careful, but your heart is no longer armored.

You can make intelligent choices including finding a way to help [the snarling dog].

So my sense is that whenever we are behaving in ways that we don't like, and when other people are, there's a leg and a trap. People that are happy, people that feel as a psychologist, I'd say good attachment to their beings in their life and the earth and so on, are not going to cause suffering to others, or at least not purposely or intentionally. Whereas if somebody's hurting, they will.

And one of my icons, civil rights icon or Ruby, Ruby sales, she says, when you see somebody that's struggling or that you're reacting to ask the question, where does it hurt? And you might not ask it out loud to that person, but you are bringing that inquiry into consciousness so that you can see how a leg is in a trap.

Kirsten Powers (10:30):

And I think Oprah has a book called What Happened To You? So instead of “what’s wrong with you,” it’s “what happened to you?”

Tara Brach (10:38):

Beautiful.

Kirsten Powers (10:39):

There's always a story there. But what I see happening a lot is people are, and you sort of talked about this in the beginning, they're in a traumatized state. Their trauma has been triggered. They feel incredibly unsafe. And so now they're acting out of that trauma. It's like in an effort to be safe, they have to find the bad guy. They may even have to scapegoat a group of people. They may have to do these different things to kind of give themselves this sense of false safety, but it is a sort of safety.

How do we help people understand when that's happening, that how deeply rooted their trauma is, and that the people also who they're upset with have deeply rooted trauma also who are acting out of it, and it just creates this cycle of trauma that just at some point someone has to say, no, no, we're not going to do this anymore.

Tara Brach (11:40):

Well, you are describing incredibly articulately the state of the world, which is trauma, playing out with trauma. I mean, that's what is happening. And this is from the shamanic traditions, the shamans talk about when people are traumatized, the soul goes into hiding.

We don't have so much access to our love, our intelligence, our creativity, our resilience, and that the way back to [what’s] called ‘soul retrieval’ often in those traditions would include being with others who create a caring container so that that person can connect with what's behind the trauma, the pain and the grief. It comes down to grieving and have a place to grieve.

I can say for myself that just recently I went to a vigil, which was really very cool because it included people from all different supposed sides or positions or whatever, sharing different stories from the people that they were connected with.

And you'd hear one person talk about my three-year-old is a hostage. And you'd hear somebody else say, my family disappeared last night. Their apartment was bombed, and the whole family's gone, and the group held a space that was a space of compassionate witnessing.

Now, a lot of people aren't ready for that, and it takes a certain courage, and initially it wouldn't be necessarily with people who are from other social positions and locations. You might do it with people that are suffering the same grief, but we need a way to grieve together.

And I can add to that, Kirsten, this was a few weeks ago on the Capitol that I went and I was holding so much grief. It wasn't until I grieved with others in public just grieving loss and suffering that my heart started to have some space to hold it, not to make things right, not to think I had an answer.

We're living in uncertainty. To think we have an answer is a little bit of hubris, but to know that the beginning of the answer is to have the courage to feel the realness of grief and not stay and blame.

This is a quote I've always loved: Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. When we're blaming, we're actually blocking ourselves from the raw emotions that most need to be felt and processed for us to come back into wholeness for us to retrieve our soul.

Kirsten Powers (14:29):

Yeah. Well, I think also you're hitting on something really important where you were in person with people and so much of what happens happens online, and it's where it's just a monologue or it's just judgment, and all of this stuff is going at people. It's not in person. It's not actually experiencing the humanity of other people. It's not allowing for the complexities, which is why I tend to feel like as much as people feel like it's really important to be online talking about these things and saying these things, sometimes it feels counterproductive to me. I don't know what you think about that.

Tara Brach (15:13):

I think it depends on how it's set up, because I too have seen it, it more feed polarization than connection. And I've also recently done some online meditations and vigils where people would bring candles and just say their prayers and again, hold that compassionate, witnessing that were very profound. People spoke off afterwards about feeling like they had found some real refuge for their grief. So I think the point that you're making is important, which is it has to have authenticity and intimacy and realness, not people viewing opinions. It's not an exchange of opinions, it's a sharing of hearts.

Kirsten Powers (16:02):

Right and I would distinguish between doing an online vigil and going on Instagram and announcing to the world the way it is and all of those kinds of things, which I think just is also another, it's like another retraumatizing almost. It just feels like everything is just adding more trauma instead of people stepping back, I just sometimes think, gosh, if people would just get offline and do their own work, the world would be so different.

Tara Brach (16:41):

You're so right that that's what's happening with most social media.

[Social media] is fueling people feeling aligned here and polarized from others there. And it's doing our own work, but then also being brave enough to begin to play our edge, meaning be vulnerable with others.

Just to share one story that touched me a lot, Kirsten, was that this is in a documentary that Van Jones put together. He talked about bringing two very different groups of people together. Some were professionals that were fighting the opiate epidemic in West Virginia and others from South Central la Crack, cocaine, having them be together for a week.

And of course at first really different politics, different races like culture collision and over time, I mean, one of the things he had them do was bring a photo of someone that they had lost due to the epidemic. And at one point in the documentary, you had one man showing his son and saying, the last thing I said to him was, you got yourself into this. You get yourself out. And you could see in the group that these very different people that would typically have really thought of the other as “other” were feeling their shared humanity. And that's the goodness that's possible when we're willing to see where it hurts and just share what matters to us.

Kirsten Powers (18:25):

It’s beautiful. Tara, thank you for taking time out of your day to talk about this important issue. And I can't recommend enought really anything that you have written or your meditations, and I will put links to all of that in here because you really are just this balm in a world that is just really hard. So thank you so much.

Tara Brach (18:49):

Oh, thank you for having me, dear, and thank you for what you're doing. You're creating a really beautiful space for this kind of a conversation.

Kirsten Powers (19:00):

Thank you.

I C Y M I:

Jen Hatmaker Has Had Enough

Let's make 2024 the year of saying no to productivity culture