Learning to Respond Not React, with Tara Brach

Welcome. I would like to begin with a quote that’s pretty much anonymous, although I have seen versions of it from Christian philosophers and Buddhists and Ghandi. This is it: “The thought becomes the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into the habit. Habit hardens into character. Character gives birth to destiny.

So watch your thoughts with care. And let them spring from love, born out of respect for all beings.” So this is an expression of karma which really is saying that causes lead to effects, that when we have certain beliefs and thoughts they create certain feelings that then turn into actions and the actions become habits and those habits end up really creating our

sense of identity and, if they are really hardened, become our destiny. And we tend to keep repeating and repeating and repeating, we are creatures of habit. So when they create our destiny and when they are based in fear – these habits – they really become the block in our lives to accessing all that we can be, to accessing happiness

and creativity and, in a deep way, a sense of our spirit. So I would say that one of the deepest expressions of despair that comes my way is when someone will report that, “Well, I have been repeating the same pattern of pushing people away or of grasping on or undermining myself or whatever it is all my life, for as long as I can remember.”

That’s a feeling of... there is a real feeling of despair because, “How can I ever change? It’s so deeply grooved!” So tonight’s reflection will really be on how we can awaken from these habitual chains of thinking, feeling and then acting, this stimulus reaction-cycle that we get caught into, that really can bind our lifes, and the title of the talk is really “The Freedom