Releasing Limiting Beliefs [Audio]

Releasing Limiting Beliefs, by Tara Brach:

[ai_playlist id=”196293″]

About Tara Brach:

A pervasive but often invisible source of suffering in our culture is self-aversion. We are a busy culture, and we move through our life feeling anxious and dissatisfied, but not fully conscious of how we neglect or judge our inner experience. We suffer from a lack of belonging: to our own bodies, to each other and to the earth. When we practice Buddhist meditation, we learn how to listen deeply and hold our life tenderly.

—

Transcript:

Greetings. I’m Tara Brach and I’d like to welcome to this podcast. While the talks in meditations are offered freely, we’d very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrach.com and our imcw.org. Thank you.

(music plays)

In this day, ___ story ___ used to tell about his daughter, ___ daughter ___, who is about 5 years old at that time, and one morning, she woke up and said to him, “Abba,” which means ‘father,’ “you know how when you are sleeping, dreaming, it seems so real. And then you wake up and realize that it’s a dream. Or when you’re awake, ___ wake up that much more and realize that this is just a dream.” Pretty ___, right?

So when we inquire ___ ourselves, we explore which really this moment between me and a full presence, or full wakefulness. What we ___ the light on is a kind of a dream-like state or there’s a movie going on and it’s starring ___, we’re the protagonist, and there are a whole role and reactivity of feelings and thoughts and behaviors that we’re living inside and we start to recognize that it’s much of the time a virtual reality. In other words, we’re living in the story about what’s happening. We’re not directly contacting our senses and what’s immediate and what’s right here.

Last week, the talk, the key elements of the talk was really our thoughts in our inner narrative and how much our thoughts keep feeling the kind of reactive looping. Where we stay stuck and really to begin to unstick ourselves. We’d have to be able to recognize thinking and step out of it re-contact our senses in our heart.

What I’d like to do in this talk is focused on a particular domain of thinking we call beliefs. And beliefs are really the very strong ways that we have concluded. This is how the world is, or this is how I am, or this is how other people are. And so, we’ll be looking at them, we’ll be looking at how people ___ they are, and how when they’re fear-based as many of them are—they imprison us. This is what the element. More than any other time in history. Many time, this is the cross worlds. One path needs to spare, and other hopelessness. The other, the total extinction. ___ wisdom to choose wisely.

So, when we’re caught in beliefs, and fear beliefs, in particular, the choices aren’t great. They’re very much of a limiting reality about what’s wrong. And if we look at them and when we kind of scan for ourselves, we often have the narrative of something’s wrong with me, or I’m not enough, I’m going to fail, I’m not attractive, people won’t really want to be with me, people won’t see me, or understand me, or others will take advantage of me. And there’s often an undercurrent of there’s a little possibility for changing this, or for changing myself, or for being happy. Because those are some of the common limiting, fear-based beliefs. And what happens is they prevent us from trusting ourselves. They prevent us from trusting others. They prevent us from sensing possibility, from taking risks, from expressing our full creativity. And in the deepest way, they prevent us from relaxing back and coming home into the love and the presence that’s really our essence. I call that our true refuge. They prevent us from taking refuge from what’s here, because we’re so anxious and tied up and knots.

In my book, ___, I actually, this is actually one of the main themes that run through the book—the power of our beliefs and there’s a good man of emphasis on. So if you find this thing compelling from this talk, that might be a place to go to, but the challenge of beliefs is that we take them as reality. Whether it’s we believe our beliefs and the deeper-rooted it is, the more trauma behind it, the more tightly we tend to hold to them. They are the virtual reality that we subscribe to.

Anthony ___ tells a story about a gentleman who knocks in his son’s door. “Jamie,” he says, “Wake up.” Jamie answers, “I don’t want to get up, papa.” The father shouts, “Get up. You have to go to school.” Jamie says, “I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not?” asked the father. “Three reasons—,” says Jamie, “First, because it’s so dull. Second, the kids tease me. And third, I hate school.” And the father says, “Well, I’m going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it’s your duty. Second, because you’re 45 years old. And third, because you’re the headmaster.”

(Audience laughs)

So, we linger in our dream. No, just to take a look at the—what’s the genesis of our ___ beliefs, and they are typically, in our personal life, they’re built on wounding experiences. Experiences where we enter the difficult environment, our family environment, our society, and we got wounded or rejected, or we drew the conclusion that this is how it’s going to be, and it’s because I’m this way, and there’s a range of beliefs we conclude. But the world becomes a dangerous place in our body, in our minds, taking that armory in our belief.

Typically, it has to do with falling short of the standards or told about the standards we need to meet to be okay. When involved in giving standards by our families, by religions, by the culture on how it is to be an okay, good person, and if we don’t match those standards, then we lock into the belief of not enough. ___ describes, he says, somewhere, I can’t find where whether that an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, will I go to hell?” “No,” he said. “And what if you didn’t know?” And then he says, “And then why ask the Eskimo honestly?” “Did you tell me?”

—

If you liked this recording and would like to make a direct financial contribution to this teacher, please click this link.

 

—

Material on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License