Tara Brach - True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

Loving Life No Matter What

My earliest memories of being happy are of playing in the ocean. When our family began going to Cape Cod in the summer, the low piney woods, high dunes, and wide sweep of white sand felt like a true home. We spent hours at the beach, diving into the waves, body surfing, practicing somersaults underwater. Summer after summer, our house filled with friends and familyand later, with spouses and new children. It was a shared heaven. The smell of the air, the open sky, the ever-inviting sea made room for everything in my lifeincluding whatever difficulties I was carrying in my heart.

Then came the morning not so long ago when two carloads of friends and family members took off for the beach without me. From the girl who had to be pulled from the water at suppertime, Id become a woman who was no longer able to walk on sand or swim in the ocean. After two decades of mysteriously declining health, Id finally gotten a diagnosis: I had a genetic disease with no cure, and the primary treatment was painkillers. As I sat on the deck of our summer house and watched the cars pull out of the driveway, I felt ripped apart by grief and loneliness. In the midst of my tears, I was aware of a single longing. Please, please, may I find a way to peace, may I love life no matter what.

This book came out of my own search for a place of peace, connectedness, and inner freedom, even in the face of lifes greatest challenges. I call this place true refuge because it does not depend on anything outside ourselvesa certain situation, a person, a cure, even a particular mood or emotion. The yearning for such refuge is universal. It is what lies beneath all our wants and fears. We long to know we can handle whats coming. We want to trust ourselves, to trust this life. We want to live from the fullness of who we are.

My search for refuge led me deeper into the spiritual teachings and Buddhist meditation practices that were so central to my life. I am a clinical psychologist and had been teaching meditation for over thirty years. I am also the founder and senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Washington, D.C. My inner work and work with others gave rise to my first book, Radical Acceptance, and I also started training psychologists and laypeople on how to bring meditation into emotional healing. Now, as the insecurity of this existence shook my inner world, the teachings that had always guided me became more embodied and alive.

In the Buddhist tradition in which I teach, the Pali word dukkha is used to describe the emotional pain that runs through our lives. While it is often translated as suffering, dukkha encompasses all our experiences of stress, dissatisfaction, anxiety, sorrow, frustration, and basic unease in living. The word dukkha originally referred to a cart with a damaged wheel. When we are suffering, we are out of balance, jolting uncomfortably along the road of our life. We feel broken or off, disconnected from a sense of belonging. Sometimes this shows up as mild restlessness or discontent; at other times, as the acute pain of grief or grip of fear. But if we listen deeply, we will detect beneath the surface of all that troubles us an underlying sense that we are alone and unsafe, that something is wrong with our life.

In Radical Acceptance, I wrote about the deep and pervasive suffering of shame, the pain of believing that something is wrong with me. I am now addressing dukkha in a broader sense. Since that book was published, Ive encountered major lossthe death of my father, the physical and mental decline of dear ones, and the challenges of my own chronic illness. Many of my students have also had their lives overturned. Some have been uprooted from their jobs; they worry about having enough to live on, and are hungry for meaningful work. Others are estranged from family and friends, and long for connection. Many more are grappling with aging, sickness, and the inevitability of death. For them, Something is wrong with me has become entangled with the pain of struggling against life itself.

The Buddha taught that this experience of insecurity, isolation, and basic wrongness is unavoidable. We humans, he said, are conditioned to feel separate and at odds with our changing and out-of-control life. And from this core feeling unfolds the whole array of our disruptive emotionsfear, anger, shame, grief, jealousyall of our limiting stories, and the reactive behaviors that add to our pain.

But the Buddha also offered a radical promise, one that Buddhism shares with many wisdom traditions: We can find true refuge within our own hearts and mindsright here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-moment lives. We find true refuge whenever we recognize the silent space of awareness behind all our busy doing and striving. We find refuge whenever our hearts open with tenderness and love. We find refuge whenever we connect with the innate clarity and intelligence of our true nature.

In True Refuge, I use the word presence to try to capture the immediacy and aliveness of this intrinsic awareness. Presence is hard to describe, because its an embodied experience, not a concept. For me, when I sense the silent, inner wakefulness that is here, I come home to a sense of wholeness. Im at home in my body and heart, at home in the earth and with all beings. Presence creates a boundless sanctuary where theres room for everything in my lifeeven the illness that keeps me from surfing the waves.