Quote

When desire for a certain person's attention becomes an I have to have kind of grasping, then identity gets organized around needing that and it becomes very solid and sticky. That causes suffering because we're not inhabiting the fullness of who we are, we're fixated and contracted on life being a certain way.

Tara Brach

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Tara Brach
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 17
Peace Activist
Psychologist
Teacher
Certain
Identity
Inhabiting
Persons
Gets
Contracted
Person
Becomes
Sticky
Kind
Causes
Needing
Way
Attention
Grasping
Life
Suffering
Fullness
Desire
Solid
Around
Organized
Fixated

More quotes by Tara Brach

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Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.
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If we're not open to losing, we're not open to loving.
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Where desire ends up causing suffering is when it fixates.
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Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.
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When we open to love, we become love.
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Making a U-turn from our thoughts to our feelings re-connects us to our own inner experience and creates the grounds for connecting with others in a more authentic way. It's a movement from head to heart.
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When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, Darling, I care about your suffering, a deep healing begins.
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If I can forgive the attachment in myself and open to the vulnerability that's underneath it, then rather than fixating on another person to satisfy my need, I'm actually going right to where the needs come from and able to bring a real healing.
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There's healthy attachment, like with a mother and child. It's biologically part of our survival.
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Allowing another to be as they are is more what I think of as space. The space to express yourself and know that you're going to be accepted. That's more where I go than with the actual physical logistics of how much time you have together and how much time you have apart.
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We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.
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When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
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I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.
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In intimate relationships, if we start trying to be more real, it's very scary.
Tara Brach
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People don't behave in angry ways unless they are feeling stressed and conflicted too.
Tara Brach
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Even a few moments of offering lovingkindness can reconnect you with the purity of your loving heart.
Tara Brach
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True refuge is that which allows us to be at home, at peace, to discover true happiness. The only thing that can give us true refuge is the awareness and love that is intrinsic to who we are. Ultimately, its our own true nature.
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Most of us grew up with a very damaging story that something is wrong with us. Gradually - or as in my case, suddenly - we become resolved not to believe this anymore. It takes a dedicated practice to follow up on that resolution, because the conditioning is very strong to keep generating self-demeaning stories.
Tara Brach
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Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.
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I speak a lot about what I call the trance of unworthiness which is really epidemic in our culture, this sense of I'm not enough, or something's wrong with me. Most of us have some level of it because our culture has all these standards (handed down through our families) of what it means to be okay.
Tara Brach