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

Author:Tara Brach [Brach, Tara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Body, Mind & Spirit, Healing, Prayer & Spiritual
ISBN: 9780553807622
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2013-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Taking Refuge in Love

At our next session, Dana told me that the worst part of the sexual abuse was wanting someone to help her, but being too scared to ask. “I would rehearse telling my mother,” she said, “and then have nightmares about my uncle finding out and kidnapping and strangling me.”

While our last meeting had “tripped off” that old terror, Dana realized that she had recovered more quickly than usual. “When you sat next to me on the couch, it started to fade. There was something about you caring about me and just being there … I knew I was safe in that moment, I was okay.” She paused for a few moments and then asked a key question: “But what can I do when I’m on my own?”

In the process of healing, there is often a natural movement or progression. First we take comfort in the physical presence of others, and then we discover within ourselves a pathway to safety and love. This is an important and delicate sequence. The traumatized self is fragile and needs an external resource. Yet because the original traumatic wounding often occurs in a relationship, relationships may have become associated with danger. For this reason, a caring and secure relationship is an essential part of the healing work.

In many shamanistic cultures, it is believed that when a person is traumatized, the soul leaves the body as a way of protecting itself from intolerable pain. In a ceremony called “soul retrieval,” the traumatized person is held in the love and safety of community as the soul is invited to return. We can translate this to many other healing relationships, where the care of a therapist, friend, support group, or teacher initially provides the safety to reconnect with some degree of presence and well-being.

But as Dana’s question implies, the deepest healing allows us to feel loved and safe in any situation, including when we’re on our own. Through meditation, our outer refuge—the presence of a caring other—can become a bridge to discovering a trustworthy inner refuge, the love and care sourced in our own being.

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha taught his followers a lovingkindness meditation to ward off fear. Each year, before the rainy season in India, hundreds of monks would gather around the Buddha for spiritual teachings and instructions. They would then go off to find a suitable location for a three-month “rain retreat,” a period of intensive practice. One year, as the story goes, the monks found an idyllic forest grove with majestic trees and a clean spring of cool water—the perfect place to meditate day and night. They didn’t realize, however, that the forest was inhabited by tree deities who felt dispossessed when the monks moved in. The infuriated spirits created terrifying illusions of monsters, ghosts, and demons, filled the groves with dreadful shrieks and moans, and produced a sickening stench. The monks soon became pale and shaky, unable to maintain any concentration or inner balance. Encouraged, the tree deities became even more aggressive, until the monks fled back to the Buddha’s encampment.

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