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

How to Apply Mindfulness to

Your Life and Work

Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge:

Finding the True Self

a TalkBack Session with

Ron Siegel, PsyD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Ruth Buczynski, PhD


Table of Contents

(click to go to a page)

What Stood Out Most ........................................................................................... 3

The Importance of Pausing ..................................................................................... 5

The Benefit of Gesture in Self-Compassion ............................................................ 7

Cultivating Self-Compassion in Times of Difficulty .................................................. 8

Introducing Mindfulness through Symbolism and Metaphor ................................. 9

About the Speakers ............................................................................................... 12

with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD; and Joan Borysenko, PhD

A TalkBack Session: Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge: Finding the True Self


A TalkBack Session: Mindfulness and the Gateways to Refuge: Finding the True Self

with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD; and Joan Borysenko, PhD

Dr. Buczynski: I always love listening to Tara and I am eager to hear what you think.

To everyone, we are now starting our TalkBack Segment. We have my two good friends, both licensed

psychologists - Joan Borysenko and Ron Siegel.

Both have very renowned reputations built mostly in Boston at Harvard, and then for Joan, beyond there.

What Stood Out Most

Dr. Buczynski: I am eager to hear what you think – so tonight, Ron, let’s start with you. What stood out to

you most in this session with Tara?

Dr. Siegel: I was very moved by Tara’s capacity or ability to make

principles of Buddhist psychology, that can feel a little distant or abstract,

very experience-near. She can “bring them home” in a very practical way.

Her use of the RAIN acronym is very, very helpful for that. With any situation in our lives, we can begin by

recognizing what is happening – simply becoming aware of what is

happening in this moment.

Then, with allowing, we can notice what resistance there might be to it

and relax that resistance. We can investigate with a kind of interest or

intimate attention to really get close to it. We might ask, “What might

this be?”

Finally, this notion of not identifying with it is to see it as impersonal – unfolding advanced mental contents

or happenings in the heart and mind.

That is remarkably applicable, and we can use that with practically any situation that comes up.

The other thing that I was really struck by is just her sense of loving oneself and connecting in a

“Her use of the RAIN

acronym is very

helpful with any

situation in our lives.”

“I was struck by her

sense of loving oneself

and connecting in a

compassionate way with

whatever experience is

happening.”


compassionate way with whatever experience is happening – she so

often came back to this “hand on heart” gesture.

In the early days of mindfulness practice in the West, that wasn’t

emphasized that much. People had much more emphasis on insight or

clear seeing and less on this capacity for love and connecting.

Since we are human beings and such social creatures, we are interrelated with each other, and that is an

important addition that she adds.

Finally, I was struck by her concept of false refuges, which is actually a very nice translation of what in

Western psychology we think of as defenses. Even if we talk to people about their defenses, they get

defensive about our talking about defenses.

The interesting thing is if we talk about defenses as false refuge, it’s a way to avoid some painful experience,

which is, in a way false, deceptive, and doesn’t work well for us, but I think it makes it much more accessible.

So that idea of defenses as false refuge is another nice gift that she provided.

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Joan, how about you – what stood out to you in this webinar tonight?

Dr. Borysenko: Certainly, Ron, you have really picked out very specifically some of the ideas that Tara

teaches so practically. One of the basics that she comes back to is our capacity to be kind to ourselves and to

love ourselves.

I have always loved Tara’s work because she taps into one of the primary causes of suffering – and that is

unkindness to oneself or lack of compassion to oneself. She normalizes it in a way, and you realize, “Oh – I’m

not the only one who picks on me; other people do this to themselves, too.”

Whether it is the mudra of touching the heart or the symbolic metaphor

of the bird that has two wings, all her metaphors of awareness and

kindness come back constantly to holding your own nobility, your own

graciousness, your own generosity of spirit, and relate more to that than

to the habits of mind that bring you down.

One of the things I particularly loved was her story of working with a woman who was filled with self-hatred

and then just asking her the question, “How does that make you feel?”

“Even if we talk to

people about their

defenses, they get

defensive about our

talking about defenses.”

“One of the basics that

she comes back to is our

capacity to be kind to

and to love ourselves.”


With that question, the woman could very profoundly settle down into the sense of sadness that was right

there in her body and look at her own brutality toward herself – her own emotional self-abuse.

Tara was able to work with that in a lovely way. The woman had

awareness of it – she had come to herself.

Then Tara talked about a forgiveness technique coming from

Hawaii – Ho'oponopono where first, you become aware of how

bad you feel and then you can be compassionate toward yourself.

You actually say, “I’m sorry” and you are sorry for the state that you are in, and then secondly, you say, “I

love you.” That sense of being generous toward yourself, whatever your feeling is, allows the dysphoric

emotion to dissipate and the spaciousness of your own true nature to shine through.

I loved how Tara had lots of ways for people to do that because I do agree that that is probably, for most of

us, a primary place of spiritual practice – the necessity for kindness toward ourselves.

The Importance of Pausing

Dr. Buczynski: Ron, Tara talked about the importance of pausing. How can we train ourselves to do this?

Dr. Siegel: I find this a very interesting area and we just had a conference at Harvard Medical School with

Thich Nhat Hanh, and Ruth, I know you were there as well.

David Silbersweig, who is a neurologist and psychiatrist and runs the psychiatry department at one of the

Harvard teaching hospitals, had a very interesting presentation about the evolution of the brain.

He was talking about when the first interneuron evolved in the first organism, and how that is what got us

started on the road to flexibility. Before then, what we had was simply a sensory neuron connecting to a

motor neuron and immediate responses.

Once we started to develop interneurons, which ultimately, if you get enough of them together, you would

call them “a brain,” then we have a capacity for stimulus and a whole bunch of processing before we get to

the response.

“Being generous toward

yourself, allows the dysphoric

emotion to dissipate and the

spaciousness of your own

true nature to shine through.”


The earlier parts of our brain actually had less pausing in them. When we are operating out of the earlier

parts of our brain, we are operating in a more instinctual, more

stereotypical, and more conditioned kind of response.

Dr. Buczynski: Are you talking about the brain stem?

Dr. Siegel: Exactly – the brain stem, in which behaviors are quite automatic. What happens, as we move up

the developmental lines phylogenetically as well as in our own maturation, is that we become better able to

pause – to actually consider, “What would be most skillful here?”

To pause is vitally important, and it is a sign of our maturity.

In terms of techniques, one of my favorites is to use an acronym called WAIT. It stands for “Why Am I

Talking?”

It’s great for a therapist or any healthcare professional – in the middle of talking – to ask, “Where is this

coming from? What’s the motivation? What’s the likely outcome?”

In essence, this is to pause and to use some of those interneurons to decide what to do.

I tend to do this whenever I am in a state of psychophysiological

arousal. I’m sitting with somebody, whether it is a patient or a friend,

and I start to notice that I am getting animated.

On a good day, I think, “Wait – what’s going on here?” which isn’t to

say not to enjoy passion or not to be fully engaged in life, but to take a moment to reflect, particularly when

there is a lot of arousal.

One of the enormous benefits of restraint in this regard is we start to really feel what’s going on.

If I have a wave of anger come and I immediately put that into yelling or screaming or throwing things, I don't

get to feel the anger. I don't really get to see what it’s all about.

But if I can wait and be with the anger, then I see, “Oh – there’s the hurt

behind it. There’s the fear behind it.” So much gets illuminated by this

process of pausing as well.

“It’s great for a therapist or

any healthcare

professional to ask, ‘Where

is this coming from?’”

“To pause is vitally

important, and it is a

sign of our maturity.”

“One of the

enormous benefits of

restraint is we start to

feel what’s going on.”


The Benefit of Gesture in Self-Compassion

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Joan, is it beneficial to use a self-compassion gesture like putting your hand on your

heart, rather than just silently saying a self-compassion meditation? Do you think it matters?

Dr. Borysenko: I do think it matters. Putting your hand on your heart is essentially a mudra, and a mudra is

part of the symbolism both in Hinduism and Buddhism – there are 108 different mudras. Most of them

involve just the hands, but some of them involve the entire body.

What we understand now is that it is not just the mind that affects the body but

it is the body that affects the mind.

Your posture and your gestures are energetic. They are part of a system of communication of all of the cells

in your body – your emotional body, your intellect, and the way you relate to others.

You can feel a difference: you put your hands to your heart and right away there is so much attached to that

– it is an automatic gesture.

In fact, the Tibetans make the point that because the mudra is the gesture, the heart is a very important. It is

where we go first, emotionally.

When you put your hands to your heart, you energetically open a focus toward love and kindness.

This isn’t the first time that we have seen gestures talked about in this series. For example, in our last session

with Ram Dass, he pointed to his heart and made the affirmation, “I

am loving-kindness,” and that, too, is a mudra.

Marsha Linehan uses “willing hands” – the openness of the hands

toward allowing, which is another mudra.

This is such a great example of the body-mind connection – and that’s a mudra, too.

Dr. Buczynski: It makes me think of Pat Ogden who talked about this.

I don't remember if it was in one of our Brain Series’ or the Trauma Series’, but I remember her bringing it up

and talking about having a male patient who put his hand on his heart, and when he did that, she put her

hand on her heart and to help the patient get more in touch with and feel some compassion for himself.

“Your posture

and your gestures

are energetic.”

“When you put your hands

to your heart, you

energetically open a focus

toward love and kindness.”


Cultivating Self-Compassion in Times of Difficulty

Dr. Buczynski: Ron, let’s go back to you, but let’s stay on self-compassion. It is so important, but in some

circumstances it is difficult to do! How can we cultivate self-compassion?

Dr. Siegel: Certainly, we can begin with things like this mudra. We talked about this a little bit in responding

to Jack Kornfield’s talk of the various practices we can do, like the

loving-kindness practice, where we repeat certain phrases to ourselves

that are compassionate.

We talked about this in Kristin Neff’s work – the unholy trinity of self-

criticism, self-isolation, self-absorption, and the ways we can tend to these.

There are two things I would like to look at in regard to self-compassion.

One is the way in which the therapy relationship helps our patients to develop self-compassion. While this is

a skill we can teach to others, simply the process itself of talking to somebody about what ails them can

actually help.

When we are able to hear their story and do it in a kind of Rogerian way where we are able to be accepting

of them, that helps to soothe the self-criticism. They can begin to think, “Here is this other human being who

doesn’t seem to be seeing me as hideous because I’m experiencing this.” So that helps with the self-criticism.

The self-isolation component is helped by simply having contact with the other person and also normalizing

what is going on.

I find myself over and over in my therapy work trying to point out ways in which whatever is happening to a

person is happening because they are part of the human family and we all experience this.

What their experiencing is happening as the natural consequence of their

particular history – they’re part of the human family.

Normalizing helps a lot of people to develop self-compassion.

Finally, simply connecting with them in a therapy relationship helps to counteract the self-absorption that

happens.

“Normalizing helps

people to develop

self-compassion.”

“The therapy relationship

helps our patients to

develop self-compassion.”


But what gets in the way of being self-compassionate, is that the moment of

being self-compassionate is also the moment of being vulnerable. If we

allow ourselves to love ourselves, then we are going to feel our hurt, we are

going to feel our fear, we are going to feel a tenderness of heart – as Tara

talked about.

This creates, as my friend Chris Germer, who writes a lot about self-compassion, back-draft. When we open

to all of this, suddenly there is this huge roar of feeling that comes up

as we connect to the underlying feeling.

Often that is an impediment to self-compassion. It is not just that we

have learned harsh super-ego injunctions about being bad in this or

that way, but we are also afraid to love ourselves because we are

afraid of all the feeling that is going to come up.

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Ron has referred to Kristin Neff.

She has done elegantly wonderful research and teaching on compassion and self-compassion and that is

really exciting and valuable.

Introducing Mindfulness through Symbolism and Metaphor

Dr. Buczynski: Joan, let’s go back to you now – and I am thinking about the symbolism of the wave and how

that can be so powerful to people.

Do you have any other powerful illustrations that we can use when we are trying to introduce mindfulness to

people?

Dr. Borysenko: Yes. First of all, let me make a contextual comment about something that Tara does and then

I am going to ground my remarks in that particular context.

She speaks a lot about what some people might call body-based inquiry, and that is tuning in to the

sensations in your body and then inquiring curiously into them – where did they come from?

As you sit and accept those, little by little, they dissipate and something else comes through, and this is what

“What gets in the

way of being self-

compassionate, is

that the moment of

being vulnerable.”

“We are afraid to love

ourselves because we are

afraid of all the feeling

that is going to come up.”


happens in the symbolism of a wave.

An emotion moves across the great ocean of your being, and if you are willing to be with it – feel the

sensation and accept it – using her RAIN metaphor and not being identified with it, the emotion goes away.

What I find when I work with symbolism with people – and I do this quite a bit – I like to ground the

symbolism in their own specific experience so that the light goes

off right away.

Let me give you an example of that: I will frequently say to

people, “We all have a kind of ‘best self’ and it comes out in

certain moments when you are not thinking about other things. You are just present to something – it can be

very common, like a sunrise or a sunset, or suddenly seeing the light, or the dew in the morning as it is

hanging off a leaf, or it can be a big experience like the birth of a child or maybe the smile of a stranger.”

Then I will say, “Have you had an experience like that?” I let them search internally for the actual sensations

of that feeling. Sometimes I call these “holy moments” because they bring us back to wholeness. Healing, of

course comes, from the Anglo-Saxon word healen, which means

“wholeness.”

People will then say, “Yes, I feel peaceful inside,” or “I feel a sense of

awe/a sense of wonder.” Sometimes somebody will say, “I just feel

spacious – all of the feelings of constriction are gone.” They will explain it, and then they are grounded in that

physical sensation.

Then I often will use a metaphor, which certainly is associated with

mindfulness, and I will say, “That is your own true nature. That’s the sun within

your heart. You don't have to add anything to yourself to be that way. It’s just

that often you have a bank of clouds that obscures that sun within your heart.”

Depending on who the client is, that bank of clouds may be made of certain memories – certain stories that

they tell themselves. It may be anything, but they get the metaphor right away.

What I also loved about Tara’s presentation was her inter-spiritual basis. She used a Christian metaphor at

one point about the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

“An emotion moves across the

great ocean of your being, and

if you are willing to be with it

the emotion goes away.”

“When I work with

symbolism I like to ground

the symbolism in their

own specific experience.”

“‘Often you have a

bank of clouds that

obscures that sun

within your heart.’”


When you use symbolism, it’s very important to use symbols that are meaningful and if there is a religious

tradition to which the client subscribes, that will be meaningful to them in that context.

Tara gave a wonderful Rumi quote as well, and I can’t remember

the precise wording right now, but essentially it says, “Why do you

seek after love? Just seek to remove the blocks to it.”

Your listeners, who are familiar with the Course in Miracles, that is

their language – removing the blocks to love’s presence.

Those who are more familiar with more mystical Christianity might be familiar with the work of Meister

Eckhart who says, “You don't find God by addition but by subtraction.”

I love that particular metaphor of, “Your true nature doesn’t need to be cultivated. It’s who you are. It’s just a

matter of clearing the blocks, clearing the clouds that cover that sun of tender loving-kindness, wisdom and

compassion in your own heart.”

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. I’m so sorry we have to stop now. The session with Tara was very moving and this is

as well.

“It’s just a matter of clearing

the clouds that cover that sun

of tender loving-kindness,

wisdom and compassion in

your own heart.”


About the speakers . . .

Joan Borysenko, PhD has been described as a

respected scientist, gifted therapist, and unabashed

mystic. Trained at Harvard Medical School, she was

an instructor in medicine until 1988.

Currently the President of Mind/Body Health Scienc-

es, Inc., she is an internationally known speaker and

consultant in women’s health and spirituality, inte-

grative medicine and the mind/body connection.

Joan also has a regular 2 to 3 page column she

writes in Prevention every month. She is the author

of nine books, including New York Times bestsellers.

Ron Siegel, PsyD is an Assistant Clinical

Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School,

where he has taught for over 20 years. He is a long

time student of mindfulness mediation and serves

on the Board of Directors and faculty for the

Institute for Medication and Therapy.

Dr. Siegel teachers nationally about mindfulness and

psychotherapy and mind/body treatment, while

maintaining a private practice in Lincoln, MA.

He is co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy

and co-author of Back Sense: A Revolutionary

Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain.

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