how to apply mindfulness to your life and work · we have interviewed tara rach before, and if you...

Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge: Finding the True Self Tara Brach, PhD - Main Session - pg. 1

How to Apply Mindfulness to

Your Life and Work

Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge:

Finding the True Self

the Main Session with

Tara Brach, PhD and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine


How to Apply Mindfulness to Your Life and Work: Tara Brach, PhD

Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge: Finding the True Self

Table of Contents

(click to go to a page)

A Definition of True Refuge .................................................................................... 3

How to Access True Refuge .................................................................................... 4

How to Discover the False Refuges ......................................................................... 5

Freeing Ourselves from the Chain Reaction ........................................................... 8

How RAIN Helps to Alleviate the Deep Pain Within ................................................ 10

Using RAIN in Settings Outside of Psychotherapy ................................................... 12

A Definition of Presence ......................................................................................... 15

“Going through Life Wearing a Spacesuit” ............................................................. 17

Bringing Patients Back to the True Self ................................................................... 18

Moving Toward Presence and True Refuge ............................................................. 20

The Three Gateways to Refuge ............................................................................... 23

Seeing Emotion as a Wave ..................................................................................... 24

References ............................................................................................................. 27

About the Speakers ............................................................................................... 28


Dr. Buczynski: Hello everybody and welcome. I am Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in the State of

Connecticut and the President of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine –

and I am so glad that you are here today.

We have a special guest, and for me one of – maybe the – leading woman in the field of meditation. I know

that is arguable, but in my opinion that would be true! She is someone who has just done an awful lot of

work, both as a therapist and as a meditation teacher.

We have interviewed Tara Brach before, and if you have followed our other courses you have had the

privilege of hearing her.

But today we have a whole new direction that we are going to take this conversation – and I am so excited

about it.

Welcome, Tara – it’s good to see you again.

Dr. Brach: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be with you, Ruth.

A Definition of True Refuge

Dr. Buczynski: You have a book out called True Refuge: Three Gateways to a Fearless Heart – and I am so

excited about it. I guess the first thing we should talk about is defining some terms. So, let’s start there. What

is true refuge?

Dr. Brach: First, I love the word refuge; there is something it brings up in me that I sense all of us long for,

which is that everyone wants to feel safe and at home.

William James put it this way when he said, “Every religion starts with the cry,

Help.” We can feel it in our bones – we sense our mortality; life is really uncertain.

There is something within us that wants to know that it is all going to be okay –

“Everyone wants

to feel safe and

at home.”

How to Apply Mindfulness to Your Life and Work: Tara Brach, PhD

Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge: Finding the True Self


that we belong to something larger.

I talk about false refuge because that longing and that insecurity often bring us to the activities that are about

avoiding our experience and numbing or trying to soothe ourselves.

False refuges work in a temporary way to help us feel better, but in the

long run they create more suffering.

A true refuge has to be truth – it has to be something that is right here, in

the present moment, and part of our being.

I consider true refuge the awareness and love that is right here within us that we learn to find access to –

that is what enables us to feel at home in our lives.

How to Access True Refuge

Dr. Buczynski: How do we go about finding access to that awareness and love?

Dr. Brach: There are many, many pathways to what I call presence – finding the aliveness and tenderness

that is right in the moment.

In fact, I would say most meditation trainings are trainings to find true refuge.

Meditation trainings help us calm the busyness of our minds that keeps telling us things are going to go

wrong. Meditation trainings bring us back to a place of aliveness and balance that is right here.

Any meditation practice that has to do with presence would be a way back to true refuge.

Dr. Buczynski: I’d like to think about false refuge for just a little bit more – when you use the term true in

front of refuge it implies false as well…

There are some obvious ones – substance abuse and any of those kinds

of addictions – but are there some subtle ones as well that maybe we

wouldn’t think of as false?

Dr. Brach: I love that question because there really are. I think of mental obsessing as a false refuge – this is

“False refuges work in

a temporary way to

help us feel better, but

in the long run they

create more suffering.”

“Any meditation practice

that has to do with

presence would be a way

back to true refuge.”


where we are trying to think our way through or trying to figure out.

Just think about how many moments of the day we are trying to figure out something! Our minds are doing

this kind of endless scratching to make things okay.

Judging is a false refuge. We use judging to put ourselves up or others

down, or put ourselves down so that we can control who we are and

become a better person, but it doesn’t work. That just temporarily

gives us a feeling that we are doing something.

These are all the different ways we stay busy. We try to perform – to prove ourselves.

Avoiding risk is a false refuge. Trying to accommodate other people is a false refuge.

There are many ways to make ourselves feel better, and they temporarily seem to comfort us, but they don't

really give us any true security.

How to Discover the False Refuges

Dr. Buczynski: When you think about avoiding risk, a lot of us organize part of our day trying to avoid risk.

Tara, I think it is profound that you get into these new ways of thinking…

How do you work with these ideas when you are working with people? How do you help them to discover

that something as subtle as avoiding risk or trying to please people is a false refuge?

Dr. Brach: It is a wonderful question because it is really asking, “What draws our attention to what is causing

suffering?”

Usually, people will come to me and they will say, “I’m really dissatisfied with

my life,” or “I’m spending a lot of time feeling anxious,” or “I’m not really

feeling like I can be intimate with others.”

We will start looking at what is it that is driving that – we want to get down to some core beliefs and feelings,

and often one of them is: “Something’s wrong with me.”

“‘What draws our

attention to what is

causing suffering?’”

“There are many ways to

make ourselves feel better,

and they temporarily seem

to comfort us, but they

don't really give us any


Then, we start looking at how, out of that belief that “Something’s wrong with me,” the person is living their

life, and that is where we see the false refuges.

False refuges come from the fear that, “I will never be loveable.” False refuges come out of the feeling of, “In

some way I’m defective.”

Then, from that fear, we start seeing, “Well, when I’m with others, I assume that they won’t really value me

so I try to ask for very little or go along with whatever I think that person wants.” We start seeing that

accommodating isn’t just a nice way of being – it is coming out of fear.

It is the same thing with not taking risk – playing it safe. Of course, we all want to survive and we don't want

to be in danger, but we’re talking here about when there is a real tension around not being willing to put out

a new idea because we are afraid other people will jump on it, or not being willing to draw if we feel artistic

because we are afraid of other people’s judgment.

In both cases we are playing it so safe that we are binding our own

creativity – we are not being spontaneous.

Then, we start seeing, “That’s a false refuge that is stopping me from living my life.”

I hope that clarifies it a little bit.

Dr. Buczynski: It does, and I am wondering if a patient comes to mind that you could tell me more about –

that could show what you did.

Dr. Brach: Sure. I am trying to think of the best example right now.

There was one woman whose false refuge was overeating. Anyone who is a dietician or a doctor or nurse

that is listening knows all the complications that come from obesity.

She was being asked to restrict her fats and so on, but she found that every

time something big was coming up, she started feeling like she was going to

fail at it – it could be with work or it could be related to a social situation – and

she would go to food. That was her false refuge.

Now, probably I am bringing up the most challenging example – with eating, it starts so early that we go for

self-soothing through food.

“In both cases we

are playing it so safe

that we are binding

our own creativity.”

“Accommodating isn’t

just a nice way of being –

it is coming out of fear.”


But for her, she found that if she could pause – and when I say pause, it means that as soon as she knew that

she was going to go for food, if she could pause even for a minute and deepen her attention, she would find

in herself this anxiety like, “Something’s going to go wrong. I’m going to blow it.”

With a pause, she could find her anxiety.

With time, she found that in those pauses she had a little more choice.

Now sometimes, she would pause and go right for the food. But it started to be about 30 percent of the time

that she would pause, sense that feeling of, “I’m going to blow it – Something’s going to go wrong” – and not

go for the food.

This is part of one meditation practice, which offers loving-kindness inwardly. She would just offer herself

(and I’m putting my hand on my heart right now because I teach people to do that)

this message of, “It’s really okay. You’re going to be okay.”

With just that touch and offering care inwardly, it would calm her enough and she

would say, “Okay – so how else – in what other way – can I find some nourishment

or comfort?” With this pause, she could make other choices.

I share that story, Ruth, because it has the template for how healing happens – when we are in a chain

reaction of our behaviors that come out of fear, we are locked into them. We keep playing them over and

over again – the key is to be able to interrupt that chain.

With a pause – and I call it the sacred art of pausing – we can shift

from going to false refuge to true refuge. It takes a lot of practice,

but that is where the magic is possible.

If we can pause, we can see the old pattern and how it gave temporary relief. In that pause, we can come

into more presence – we have this incredible possibility of making a new choice.

Dr. Buczynski: Yes. That’s a sweet and fascinating story, and you are right about the template for how

healing happens and the chain reaction – you mentioned that a chain reaction takes place.

“It starts so

early that we go

for self-soothing

through food.”

“With a pause,

she could find

her anxiety.”

“With a pause – the sacred

art of pausing – we can

shift from going to false

refuge to true refuge.”


Freeing Ourselves from the Chain Reaction

Dr. Buczynski: Maybe it would help if we got into that chain reaction just a little bit more. A little earlier you

were talking about someone – I don't think you were meaning to talk about a specific person, although

maybe someone would come to mind – but someone pleasing people and fearing the experience of not

having people feel/want them there and including them…

How do you help people see or experience, with awareness, that chain reaction that you referred to?

Dr. Brach: Two responses to that help to make it practical. One is, again, meditation training – and this is

mindfulness training.

This allows us to, in a meditation session, begin to notice how the chain reaction is going on all the time –

that we might have an anchor or a place that we are collecting our attention, for example, with the breath.

Then we notice that the mind has left the breath and gone into whatever its stories are, and we can begin to

see, in a more microscopic way what is happening there and what is happening everywhere in our lives.

The way we leave the present moment can happen like this. In the meditation, let's say, we have a thought of

something we are looking forward to. That thought will lead to a plan on – let's say we are looking forward to

being with a person that we really want to be with.

We will start rehearsing what we are going to say and what might happen, and we will see how that chain

just gets more and more involved. Then we will come back – “Oh, yes, come back to the breath,” but that

desire for pleasure will go right back into the same chain reaction.

The same thing happens with pain: we are sitting there and we have, let's say, a pain in our back. The next

thing we know there is a thought like, “Oh, no – this is going to get

worse. I’m not going to be able to move around well today.”

That thought will come into a judgment of, “Oh, I haven't really been

taking care of myself.” It just becomes one thought after another – we

start looping.

Meditation starts showing us how the mind – the mind and the body – go into these reactivities, but we can

come back in a meditation.

“We start rehearsing what

we are going to say and

what might happen, and

that chain just gets more

and more involved.”


During the day, we might see the same thing. We might see how our mind is

lurching forward to a meal we are going to have that night and we are not

really paying attention to something that is going on in the moment.

With meditation, we have a better capacity to say, “Come back. Come back.

Be right here. Live the life that is right here.”

Meditation is a training ground for seeing the ways that we go into reactivity during the day.

I will give you one example for myself, which happened yesterday. I got an email from someone asking me to

do something that somebody else was already supposed to have taken care of in our organization.

I felt oppressed, and I felt the demand and the tension of it, and so my chain reaction was, “Wait a minute –

that was somebody else’s job…” I immediately started putting together an email that was rather brisk.

Then I paused – because I could sense that same reactivity of the unpleasantness of feeling the demand and

the way my mind went into it.

I paused and I took about two minutes – which is a long pause, actually – where I just breathed and I asked

two questions – and these are the key questions.

One is: “What is happening inside me right now?” I could feel the tension and I could feel the speeding,

circling thoughts.

The second question is: “Can I just be with this? Can I just let it be, without doing something?”

In that space, Ruth, where I was just letting it be and breathing, it unwound itself. I got in touch, underneath

the annoyance, with the fear of, “Oh, no – I’m never going to catch up. I’m going to fall short on all the things

I’m supposed to do.”

So, some kindness toward myself came up, and then there was just a lot more space and ease.

Of course, I didn’t send that email – I wrote a much different kind of email – the behavior was shifted.

Internally – and this is really the key to seeking refuge and the key to freedom – there was a shift in my sense

of my own identity.

I went from the offended, annoyed, reactive, egoic person to a space of presence and kindness, which felt

“Meditation is a

training ground for

seeing the ways that

we go into reactivity

during the day.”


more like home – it was a refuge. It was a place that really felt like I was where I want to live.

That’s just a very typical “in the day” example of how we can, in the midst of reactivity, pause and come back

to something that feels more true to us.

Dr. Buczynski: That was very helpful, and it leads me to the next question.

How RAIN Helps to Alleviate the Deep Pain Within

Dr. Buczynski: Supposing you are working with a patient and they learn to ask the question, “What is going

on with me right now? What is happening inside me right now and can I be with this?”

I can imagine that sometimes people could feel some pretty painful

things – not that that’s bad or that we necessarily want to make

every bad feeling go away. But what would you be counseling them

to do next?

With that feeling of, “I’m not good enough” or if they are comparing

themselves to other people and saying, “I’m not as good as they are,” what would you do next?

Dr. Brach: In True Refuge, I offer an acronym that helps guide people to stay present with their unfolding

experience in a way that will help them come home – and the acronym is RAIN.

So often, people are in that place of, “I’m falling short,” and they have an uncomfortable sense of, “I’m

defective. I’ve blown it in some way” – and that happens, by the way, to us all the time.

Behind the scenes when we are moving through the day, there is an

ongoing commentary inside of feelings about how we are doing.

Let’s say a person gets in the grip of those feelings.

The first step is R – to Recognize what is happening: “Okay, I recognize

it. I’m caught in the sense of deficiency – caught in the sense of falling short.”

Then, the A is to Allow. That is where the pause is. It is like we are saying, “Okay, this is the actuality of what

is happening right now. Can I just let it be here – right now – for these moments? Can I just let be – not try to

“When we are moving

through the day, there is

an ongoing commentary

inside of feelings about

how we are doing.”

“In True Refuge, I offer an

acronym that helps guide

people to stay present with

their unfolding experience –

and the acronym is RAIN.”


hide from it, not try to make it go away, but to just allow it for the

moment.”

The I of RAIN is where we begin to activate some interest. For example,

“So what’s really going on inside me?”

Interest can carry us a long way, Ruth. If you are interested, there is a

little more energy and engagement just to hang in with what is there. So we begin to just investigate, “What

is going on in my body? What am I believing?”

The I has this quality of Intimate attention, which means it is gentle – it is kind.

At this step, people might sense, “Oh, I’m feeling a real squeeze in my chest. I’m feeling a kind of pressure in

my throat. I’m feeling a lot of unpleasantness, or I’m feeling even a little bit queasy – like something is really

wrong with me. And what am I saying to myself? That right now, if other people experience me this way, I’m

going to be rejected and unloved.”

There is some real core belief there, and what does that bring up? It

brings up a real sense of sadness and aloneness.

I often encourage, while a person is investigating, some gesture of presence and kindness toward what is

going on – again, I am demonstrating here with my hand on my heart.

If you can be investigating your experience and in some way sending energetically the message of “I care,” it

is amazing how that experience is free to unfold and resolve in a very interesting way.

With the N of RAIN – we have gone from Recognize, Allow, and Investigate with Intimate attention – and now

the N of RAIN is that we discover we are no longer identified – Not identified.

This is the magic of transformation – when we bring in this sense of

presence. Instead of being the deficient self, by paying attention we

have enlarged and just become more of that presence.

There is more openness; there is an expanded sense of being – we

are relating to the experience, not from it.

With the N of RAIN, there is really nothing to do there – we have realized the freedom of an enlarged sense

“I often encourage, while

a person is investigating,

some gesture of

presence and kindness

toward what is going on.”

“With the N of RAIN we

discover we are no longer

identified – Not identified.”

“This is the magic of

transformation – there is an

expanded sense of being –

we are relating to the

experience, not from it.”


of who we are.

In response to your questions, the way I guide people is to walk

them through that and I give them the acronym – that basic

sense of how to be with themselves so that they can keep

company with their experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who went through that

stroke process, says that “Our emotions last for 1.5 minutes. But if we add a lot of thinking, then of course,

the thinking feeds the emotion in a way that can draw it out for a long time.”

In practicing RAIN, instead of getting locked into an emotional reaction, we are bringing a presence to it that

allows it to unfold and resolve itself in a way that is healing.

I hope that gives you a sense of how anybody, either in a therapeutic setting or bringing the therapy home,

can begin to work with this.

Using RAIN in Settings Outside of Psychotherapy

Dr. Buczynski: I want to expand this outside of the field of psychotherapy – many of the people on the call

are physicians, nurses, physical therapists, and occupational therapists.

Let’s take, for example, an oncology nurse. Is RAIN something that you could picture being helpful to

someone who is having a problem enduring chemotherapy or the side effects of chemotherapy?

Dr. Brach: Absolutely. In fact, I am glad you brought that particular example up because I was working with a

woman – I was at a workshop and we spent some time together – who was in the midst of or at the tail end

of chemotherapy and she had come to this workshop still feeling a lot of the effects.

When we started to do RAIN to work with the unpleasantness that she was experiencing in her body, she

discovered very quickly that she could recognize and allow the unpleasantness, but the fear that went with it

was where she got really stuck.

I have worked with many, many doctors, especially integrative medicine doctors who work with chronic pain

and work with different kinds of illness, and it is often not the tolerance of the pain but the fear that comes

“In practicing RAIN, instead of

getting locked into an

emotional reaction, we are

bringing a presence to it that

allows it to unfold and resolve

itself in a way that is healing.”


with the pain…

Dr. Buczynski: The anticipation.

Dr. Brach: Exactly right – the anticipation of what is going to go wrong/what might get worse, and the

meaning of the pain. People make their own meaning – “Things aren’t working – I’m not healing” – which is

the worst part.

I find that people in the medical profession who use RAIN with their patients see it as very, very powerful

because that is where they can interrupt the process of getting locked into

the fear/pain cycle by saying, “Recognize – So, what’s happening? Okay, so

this is fear. Okay, Allow it for a moment. Just Allow it.”

Fear is challenging; it really takes off in the company of another person.

“So, with fear, Investigate – what’s the belief here?” If you can see the

belief and name it, then it doesn’t have as much power over you.

If you can say, “Oh, I’m believing that this pain means such-and-such,” then there is a really, really deep

wisdom that comes when we start learning we don't have to believe our beliefs – and that is the power of

mindfulness.

If you can recognize a belief, you are not as identified with it – it is not like you take it for granted – that it is

true.

In fact, one of my teachers says, “Beliefs are real but not true.”

These beliefs are real in the sense that they are in our minds and they create a biochemistry of fear in our

bodies – but they are not true. Beliefs are just symbols – they are just sound bites and images.

So, back to RAIN: you Investigate and you see that belief. You sense how that belief is generating even more

fear, which ends up creating tension in the body and more pain.

You then bring an Intimate attention to it – you are saying to the fear, “I’m

with you. I care about you. Please relax.”

I know about this fear because I was in the hospital – I was in the cardiac unit for a week – and the fear was

so strong about not getting better.

“It is often not the

tolerance of the pain

but the fear that

comes with the pain…”

“If you can recognize

a belief, you are not

as identified with it.”


I was practicing RAIN – recognizing it, allowing it, investigating it – but as soon as I would try to really

investigate the fear, it just felt so strong that I would go right back into my obsessing thoughts of how I

wasn’t going to get better and what should I do.

Finally, I remembered that one Tibetan teacher described the whole

spiritual path as, “Meeting our edge and softening.”

So I said, “Okay, meet my edge. The edge is this fear. Can I soften?”

That is when I put my hand on my heart and said, “It’s okay,

sweetheart.” And I just said it a few times. I was investigating, feeling

the fear, and I said, “It’s okay, sweetheart.”

That is what allowed me to deepen my presence, to really stay with what was there – and in deepening my

presence, there was a space that opened up where I could be with what was there, and it wasn’t so much

suffering.

That was the N of RAIN – again, the shift from being the fearful patient to being in that space of presence and

kindness that could be with what was there.

My sense is that for anybody in the medical profession and psychotherapy, if we can help our clients, if we

can help our patients to find a way to enlarge their presence so they can relate to what is happening rather

than be caught inside it, it makes for a lot more potential healing.

Dr. Buczynski: If you are the oncology nurse or the physical therapist, would you recommend suggesting that

a patient put his or her hand on their heart?

Dr. Brach: Sure, and if it doesn’t feel comfortable, then not to do it.

There are a lot of different ways that we can do what I call a “gesture of kindness.” I have found that for most

people, if they can even have the intention of being kind toward what is going on inside of them, then that

opens the door. There begins to be a softening and a more spacious sense of presence that makes what is

going on easier.

Here is the classic metaphor: imagine putting dye in a sink filled with water. The color of the water

completely changes, but if you put it in a lake, it doesn’t.

If you help a person enlarge – get a more spacious perspective and a sense of being, they can tolerate what is

“If we can help our patients

to find a way to enlarge

their presence so they can

relate to what is happening

rather than be caught

inside it, it makes for a lot

more potential healing.”


going on in a way that doesn’t cause suffering and reaction.

Dr. Buczynski: Many times, psychotherapists deal with

people who have an awful lot of self-loathing, where the

intention to be kind could be a big stretch.

How do you deal with that?

Dr. Brach: Probably one of the deepest sufferings is just what you are bringing up: self-loathing can go so

deep that when I say to somebody, “You might put your hand on your heart and offer a kind message,” it

brings up a sense of either, “Impossible” or an anger that says, “I hate myself. I can’t do that.”

Usually, the most powerful and beautiful pathway that helps us to begin to move in that direction is to bring

to mind anybody or any being that we can imagine holding us with kindness.

It may be someone’s mother or child or grandmother or friend. It might

be a pet (I find that a dog is the most common for many of us!). It might

be a spiritual figure – it could be God, or Jesus, or the Dalai Lama, or the

bodhisattva of compassion, Kuan Yin, or Buddha – it doesn’t matter.

You just bring to mind some being – alive or dead or spiritual – that you can imagine could regard you with

kindness and care.

Sometimes I will have somebody put their hand on their heart – and let’s say it is a person who can relate to

the love of Jesus – they will just imagine that love coming through their hand to their heart.

Gradually, gestures like that will soften and open them in a way that they can begin to sense the possibility of

holding themselves in that same way. It takes time. But that is the practice – to take it from what seems to be

the outside until there is a bit of softening of the heart.

A Definition of Presence

Dr. Buczynski: Thank you. Let’s talk a little more about presence. We have brought it up a few times so far.

How would you define presence?

“If you help a person get a more

spacious perspective and a sense

of being, they can tolerate what is

going on in a way that doesn’t

cause suffering and reaction.”

“You just bring to mind

some being that you can

imagine could regard you

with kindness and care.”


Dr. Brach: It’s a word where different teachers have different descriptions.

I think of presence as the experience of awareness that we realize through our senses. So it is an expression

of awareness.

When we are in the here and now with our experience – like right now, you can just sense that you are aware

of the sound of my words, and for all those who are listening, you are aware of other sounds around you and

what you are looking at visually. You can also sense in the

background an alert inner stillness.

Presence is a sense of wakefulness or openness that is aware of

what is happening.

There is what we are noticing, and then there is the awareness that

is aware of it. If we really start paying attention to what I call presence – that awareness that is embodied –

we will sense that there is a knowing quality.

This is down to the very basic essence of what is presence – there is something in you that knows, moment to

moment, what is happening.

There is an openness to presence – it does not fight what is happening. Presence doesn’t judge or pick. There

is no interference. It is just a quality of openness. It is like the sky – different emotional weather will go

through and awareness doesn’t get flavored or colored. It is just there.

The other quality that comes with presence – and this is the active quality – is that presence, when it

encounters different aspects of life, there is a quality of tenderness or warmth so that when we are resting in

presence and we see somebody suffering, there is a natural caring about that or if we see something

beautiful, there is a natural love for that.

I would say that love is the most primal activity of awareness. That is the way I would define it.

People find helpful the image of a sunlit sky – that presence or awareness is like a

sunlit sky that is both open and yet lit with the capacity of knowing, and there is

innate warmth to it, too.

“Presence is a sense of

wakefulness or openness that

is aware of what is

happening. Presence does

not fight what is happening.”

“Love is the most

primal activity of

awareness.”


“Going through Life Wearing a Spacesuit”

Dr. Buczynski: You have a concept that you termed the “small self” and I would like to get into that idea. In

your book, you talk about “Going through life wearing a spacesuit.” What do you mean by that?

Dr. Brach: Here is a way to consider it: we come into being and we come into an

environment that is challenging.

We have a sense of being separate, and there are things out there that are

threatening to us. There are things we need that are out there, and so we acquire an ego to help us navigate.

In a way, the spacesuit is the ego itself – it is those strategies that we have managed to develop that help us

go after what we want and avoid what we don't want – the spacesuit defends and protects us.

There is nothing inherently wrong about wearing a spacesuit. What happens, though – and this is where the

path of healing and spiritual path both come in – too often we get

identified with the spacesuit.

In other words, we consider ourselves the egoic self, the spacesuit, and

we forget who is looking through.

It is like we forget who is really listening right now, or we forget that

innate tenderness of heart that is here – because we are so familiar with our sense of self as the wanting self,

or fearing self, or achieving self, or failing self.

We lose touch with our wholeness – and that is what all healing comes back to – reconnecting with

wholeness, whether it is healing psychologically, or physical healing, or you are reactivating a fuller flow and

movement through the body. It is coming back to wholeness – the

wholeness of being.

Dr. Buczynski: What is the reason that you refer to it as “small self?”

Dr. Brach: There is a shrinking or contracting that happens. If you think

of when you get afraid, it is pretty clear to us that when we are afraid, we become smaller and we lose touch

with a sense of connection with others.

Our mind becomes very fixated and rigid and repeats itself. We come into a feeling of smallness – the small

“The spacesuit

defends and

protects us.”

“We lose touch with our

wholeness – and that is

what all healing comes

back to – reconnecting

with wholeness.”

“When we are afraid, we

become smaller and we

lose touch with a sense of

connection with others.”


and separate self is a sense of our being when it is caught in the wanting and the fearing.

The small self has us lose connection with our sense of vastness – with that

sense of the full web of aliveness and love that we are part of. In the small

self, we’ve forgotten that.

Small self is when we are forgetting the truth of who we are.

Bringing Patients Back to the True Self

Dr. Buczynski: To come back to a true self, how are you thinking about that and how do you talk to people

about true self?

Can you give me some thoughts on what a listener today might do to help the patients they work with come

back more to their true self?

Dr. Brach: For me, when I’m working with someone, the first part of that

is to be able to see that person beyond their mask.

The first step is to get out of our categories for each other and to become

alert to how, when we are in our own being, we are not connected to our

own wholeness.

When we are feeling like a separate self, we tend to turn others into unreal others, and they become a

“patient” or a “client” – a category.

The first step is to be inhabiting a whole sense of presence ourselves, and then to be able to look at another

and see behind the mask of that person’s ego or defenses or whatever it is that we might focus on, in order

to see the consciousness of that being who wants to be happy and has a longing to be free.

We want to be able to sense the creativity and love and goodness of that

person, so that our very recognition helps that person to come back to

who they are.

To me, the greatest gift that any clinician, healer, medical person – any of

“Small self is when we

are forgetting the

truth of who we are.”

“When we are feeling

like a separate self, we

tend to turn others into

unreal others, and they

become a ‘patient’ or a

‘client’ – a category.”

“The greatest gift that

any of us can give is to

sense the wholeness of

the being we are with.”


us – can give is to sense the wholeness of the being we are with.

Then, how do we help them to come back? That depends on the role

we are in with them, part of it is as Rumi says, “Don't seek for love

but seek to recognize all the barriers we have to love.”

That means that we help people to discover how their thoughts and

how their ways of being with themselves are actually blocking them from their wholeness.

This brings us back to some of the examples that I gave before – that you might be with somebody and notice

that they have a repeating thought and belief pattern where they are telling themselves a very limiting story

about themselves

They are telling themselves, “I’m unlovable. Others will find out who I really am and not love me. I’m

undeserving. I’m always going to fail at things.”

Or maybe we see the way the person is blocking themselves by some behavior that is causing them to

suffer…and that is where we begin.

We begin by having a person get in touch with how they are causing

suffering through their own thoughts or behaviors.

We begin by bringing in RAIN – and that is just another way of saying,

“Bring these wings of presence to what is going on.”

The central teaching through true refuge is that there are these powerful ways of deepening presence – and

through the book I give many different pathways for doing it.

But it comes down to what they call the two wings of the bird – one wing is to notice what is happening in the

present moment, with lucidity and clarity and the other wing is then to hold that with the quality of kindness.

As people read the book, they see different situations that they get caught in, whether it is physical pain,

chronic pain, the fear of that pain – as many people in the medical profession are dealing with – or whether it

is more what psychotherapists are dealing with, which has a lot to do with what I call the trance of

unworthiness – undeserving and conflict with others.

Whatever the issue, people find, through reading the book, how they can bring a very transforming presence

“But it comes down to

what they call the two

wings of the bird to notice

what is happening in the

present moment, and to

hold that with kindness.”

“We begin by having a

person get in touch with

how they are causing

suffering through their own

thoughts or behaviors.”


to that and come back home to their natural strength and power – their natural love and presence.

Dr. Buczynski: I felt a profound sense of wanting to just capture or highlight something you said back there

about one of the most important things that any practitioner can do

is to see someone’s wholeness.

I think people see so often their brokenness…and it is that earnest

attempt to fix it that perpetuates it.

Although that is not entirely true. There is effort needed, and that attempt to fix things is part of that genuine

effort, but seeing their wholeness while they are seeing their brokenness is such a big part of what we bring

to therapy – along with the diagnosing and the treating and the prescribing…

Dr. Brach: I am really glad you highlighted that because it gets to the heart of what matters.

If we can first and foremost look at each other – “to see the divine shining through” or “to see the goodness”

or “to see the real humanity” – and hold that right in the foreground, as the truth, then we can, within that,

begin to look at patterns, together, that are asking for attention, as long as we primarily honor who the

person really is – which actually draws forward their strengths in looking at patterns and in being able to step

out of them.

Moving Toward Presence and True Refuge

Dr. Buczynski: So many people have never felt really good about themselves –approving or accepting of

themselves.

How would you recommend taking a person experiencing that kind of situation, and helping them to move

into a place of kindness – moving a person toward true refuge and presence?

Dr. Brach: Again, you are bringing up what I think of as the core suffering that is most pervasive in our

population, and I did a lot with that in my first book, Radical Acceptance. That was very much focused on

when someone is caught in the trance of unworthiness and how they can begin to wake up from it.

One of the things I have noticed – it has been ten years or so since I wrote that book – is that I continue to

find that when there is the compassion to see that we are suffering, we get kinder towards ourselves, but

“One of the most

important things that any

practitioner can do is to see

someone’s wholeness.”


that is hard to see.

In other words, many people will sense, “Yes, I’m having an awful

time – and I deserve it.” Or, “I’m having an awful time – and other

people have it worse.”

It is rare to have that bare moment of, “Right now, this being is suffering.”

I remember working with one woman, very much the way you were describing, Ruth, who was really down

on herself.

She came to me because of a conflict with her teenage daughter. It was just getting more and more that she

was always angry at her daughter, and her daughter was always getting more defensive. This woman was

angry because her daughter was doing drugs and her grades were going downhill and so on. She was really

worried, but she started to blame herself.

When she came in, we started to do RAIN with that cluster of being angry and the self-blame, and as we

investigated, she came down to the sense that it wasn’t just with her daughter that she felt she was falling

short…it really came down to, as she said when I asked her, “I feel like I have fallen short in every relationship

I’ve ever had.”

So we began to inquire about that and it was as if everywhere she looked, in some way she was the bad

person, the inattentive person, the selfish person – just not coming through.

I asked her, “How does it feel when you feel that you are falling short?” and she could feel right away the

sense of constriction and the weightiness of it – the real pain of it.

Then I asked her – and this was a key question – “What is it like to know that, since you were very, very

young, you have been living with this sense of contraction? What is it like when you start sensing how it has

affected your life?”

And she told me, “It has affected my life. It’s kept me from being close with people. It’s kept me from ever

relaxing. It’s kept me from really enjoying my moments. The sense of

‘Something is wrong with me’ has kept me from living my life.”

When she started getting – and this is the point – the landscape of

her life – of how much this sense of being down on herself had kept

“When there is the

compassion to see that we

are suffering, we get

kinder towards ourselves.”

“The sense of ‘Something is

wrong with me’ has kept

me from living my life.”


her from her life – that is when her heart started breaking. She started

getting this “Ouch!” feeling.

I consider that “Ouch” the pivotal moment when we can really get, “Wow

– I’m suffering. This is real suffering.”

This is what I call soul sadness, where we are truly sympathetic to the plight of this being right here. It is not a

pitying – it is just a deep, deep kind of compassion.

That was when she could begin to put her hand on her heart and just say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry” – and her

“I’m sorry” meant, “I’m just so sad for this predicament.”

I will add to this by telling about one Hawaiian healer who has the phrase, “I’m sorry – and I love you.”

He said that no matter what comes up, in himself or in somebody he is working with, he will start allowing

those two phrases to come through: “I’m sorry,” meaning, “Oh, that’s my real compassion towards what is

going on” and, “I love you,” meaning, “I have a real sense of care – pure care.”

So that became her practice – she would, when she would start to get caught in the trance of unworthiness

and feel that deep sense of deficiency, she would right away feel how much it was affecting her and how

much it was affecting her life – that “Ouch!”

She would say, “I’m sorry – and I love you.” That began to defuse the pattern that she had lived with so long

– all the beliefs and feelings about what was wrong – and she replaced them with a sense of regarding herself

with clarity and kindness, which was incredibly refreshing and life-giving for her.

What’s really interesting is her relationship with her daughter – the more she was able to have that kind of

forgiving self-compassion towards herself in her meditation, she would begin to think about her daughter,

reflect on her daughter and sense what her daughter was going through – what was going on behind the

lines that was driving the drugging and the inattention to school and so on.

Her daughter was soon to graduate and she could feel how her

daughter was caught in a deep sense of insecurity about her future

and a fear about what was next.

Not that she felt her daughter’s false refuges were wholesome, but

she could then hold her daughter with that same kindness. In fact,

“I consider that ‘Ouch’

the pivotal moment

when we can really get,

‘Wow – I’m suffering.’”

“All the beliefs and feelings

about what was wrong –

and she replaced them with

a sense of regarding herself

with clarity and kindness.”


she imagined putting her hand on her daughter’s cheek and saying to her daughter, “I’m sorry – and I love

you.”

As a result, something energetically started loosening, so they were able to shift the quality of their dialogue.

The Three Gateways to Refuge

Dr. Buczynski: We have talked a little bit about the three gateways to refuge: truth, love and awareness. I

am wondering…How can we help people accept real change – to accept that truth, love and awareness?

Dr. Brach: How about this? Let me define those three

gateways to refuge. I will define them because it helps to

understand them a bit.

You find that these are the archetypal ways that we come home to peace and freedom – and you can find

them in many different religious traditions, in different forms, and I find that really interesting.

So, here is what they are. First, awareness is the vast space of wakefulness that is considered the core of our

being. It is sometimes described as the God head. Awareness is that pure intelligence, awakeness, and

cognizance of what is going on.

Truth is really the truth of the present moment. It is what is actually happening moment to moment – so that

right now, there may be a sense of vibrating or tingling, or the hearing of sound or the seeing of certain

images.

It is the moment-to-moment experience, including the experience of feeling deficient and the experience of

believing certain thoughts.

Love is the quality of heart-presence – the tenderness that can regard the truth with the feeling of care.

I have heard different teachings that describe awareness, truth, and love – with awareness as Father, truth as

Son, and love as The Holy Ghost.

I have heard the teachings of Satchidananda as the Hindu version; I have

heard the Jewish versions. These archetypes of vast awareness, moment-to-

“Awareness is the vast space of

wakefulness that is considered

the core of our being.”

“Love is the quality

of heart-presence.”


moment truth of what is happening and love are considered to be innate gateways home.

Now, the truth is that they are utterly interrelated. In a moment that

you are totally open to truth, your heart is tender with love – and

that loving tenderness is grounded in awareness. So you can’t

separate them, but you can emphasize one over another.

I hope that gives you a little better feeling for them.

Dr. Buczynski: Yes, I think that’s helpful, and it is interesting to see how that comes through in the personal

lives of many different faiths…that all of us in this vast audience of thousands of practitioners represent.

Seeing Emotion as a Wave

Dr. Buczynski: You talked in your book about the wave – seeing emotion or what is happening as a wave.

Why is that useful and how do you help people go into that?

Dr. Brach: This is where we are talking about the pathway of truth –

being with the moment-to-moment experience.

One of the metaphors that I find useful is to think of our being as an ocean and in each moment, we are

having waves of thoughts, of fears, of sadness, of excitement – whatever it is – but different waves are

coming through.

When we get in trouble, it is because we get rolled by the waves – we are caught in a handful of them, our

identity is wrapped around them, and our world gets small.

A lot of what we’ve talked about so far, Ruth, is about the pathway – the gateway – of truth, being with the

present moment, and love.

We are talking about: How do you be with what is happening in the

present moment? How do you arouse the love that helps you to fully

digest and transform what is going on?

The gateway of truth – the presence – means: How do you really be

“One of the metaphors that

I find useful is to think of

our being as an ocean.”

“How do you arouse the

love that helps you to fully

digest and transform what

is going on?”

“In a moment that you are

totally open to truth, your

heart is tender with love –

and that loving tenderness

is grounded in awareness.”


with those waves? How do you let them be and not try to get away

from them or dissociate from them?

One of the phrases I find really beautiful is from Zen Master Ryokan:

“Entrusting yourself to the waves” – and this is Zen Master Ryokan.

Entrusting yourself to the waves means letting go of all resistance and letting the waves of experience move

through your body – just letting them come and go – because if you let them come, they do go.

It is as I described before, with the 1.5 minute of emotion – entrusting yourself to the waves creates a space

for life to flow through and not get blocked up.

That is what I mean with the metaphor of the waves. They can

come in any shape or form, and the more we are able to stay with

what is there, the more we discover that we do have the space

and the courage and the intelligence to work with what comes up

in our lives.

There is a beautiful phrase called the lion’s roar, which is the confidence that comes. I think for all of you

listening, you know intuitively what I mean by this – it’s the confidence that you can handle what is around

the corner.

For so many of us, there is a tension in our body and in our mind about what is coming up next, and that

tension inhibits us from living what is going on right here. There is a sense that around the corner there is

going to be something that is too much to handle.

So part of this whole path of taking refuge – of learning how to come into presence with the truth of the

moment – is building a confidence that anything that comes up is

workable. That is the lion’s roar.

That confidence gives us more of a pure sense of happiness and

freedom than any other particular happiness. It is the confidence that

life is cooperating and going our way, and no matter what happens,

we can be with the life that unfolds.

Dr. Buczynski: I am sorry, but we are out of time already. I just want to again reference your book. Your first

“Entrusting yourself to the

waves creates a space for

life to flow through and

not get blocked up.”

“For so many of us, there is a

tension in our body and in

our mind about what is

coming up next, and that

tension inhibits us from living

what is going on right here.”

“The lion’s roar is the

confidence that life is

cooperating and going our

way, and no matter what

happens, we can be with

the life that unfolds.”


book I have recommended to so, so many people – and I am sure that many, many people who are listening

today have as well.

The title is Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. Another book is True Refuge:

Three Gateways to a Fearless Heart.

The whole concept of a fearless heart is such a precious idea.

Tara, I just want to say thank you for working so hard – I know that it is not

easy to write a book. I want to thank you, too, for all of your teachings, and

really for your life’s work.

You contribute so much and bring such precious, profound teachings to our world and to our professions. I

am proud to have you as a colleague and have you represent us. So thank you.

Dr. Brach: Thank you, Ruth. I bow to you and to all of you that have gathered. I can feel us in the field

together, and it is all part of us serving the healing of this world. So I am grateful to participate – yes, thank

you.

“The whole concept

of a fearless heart is

such a precious idea.”


Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

References


Tara Brach, PhD is a leading western

teacher of Buddhist meditation, emotional

healing, and spiritual awakening. She has

practiced and taught meditation for over 35

years, with an emphasis on vipassana

(mindfulness or insight) meditation.

Tara is the senior teacher and founder of the

Insight Meditation Community of Washington. A

clinical psychologist, Tara is the author of

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with

the Heart of a Buddha and True Refuge: Finding

Peace & Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart.

Ruth Buczynski, PhD has been combining her commitment to mind/body medicine

with a savvy business model since 1989. As the founder

and president of the National Institute for the Clinical

Application of Behavioral Medicine, she’s been a leader

in bringing innovative training and professional

development programs to thousands of health and

mental health care practitioners throughout the world.

Ruth has successfully sponsored distance-learning

programs, teleseminars, and annual conferences for

over 20 years. Now she’s expanded into the ‘cloud,’

where she’s developed intelligent and thoughtfully

researched webinars that continue to grow exponentially.

About the speakers . . .

how to apply mindfulness to your life and work · we have interviewed tara rach before, and if you...

Documents