How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting TaraBrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. This fall we experimented for about six weeks with including an ad before this podcast. And we've decided not to move forward with any more advertising. Many of you shared that it disrupted the flow of your listening and I really understand it didn't feel aligned with the spirit of this offering. These teachings and meditations will continue to be freely available and your support truly makes that possible. Thank you friends. Thank you for whatever you've offered and for your continued generosity in whatever form feels right to you. Namaste. Welcome friends. Thank you for being here. Some of you may have heard of Carl Busby. He's the man from United Kingdom who 27 years ago decided he was going to walk around the world and he's covered 30,000 miles. He's still walking but he should be arriving in his hometown in the UK very soon. And his advice, you know, when he's been asked about what his takeaways are from his journey, his advice is to see the world how it really is. He says 99.9% of the people I have met have been the very best in humanity. The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems. So this is reflected in something I read the 2025 World Happiness Report where a key finding has been that believing others are kind, believing in basic goodness has a stronger impact on your happiness than the actual difficult teas or hardships that you might be facing. And as related research saying, we anticipate less kindness than is actually there. And you might pause for a moment right now and just check this out. Imagine entering a gathering, anticipating that those who are there are very kind, sensitive, accepting people. Imagine that and just noticing how does your body and mind feel as you enter? What kind of experience do you anticipate might be possible? And then in contrast, imagine entering a gathering and the perception is that people who will be there are going to be out for themselves, competitive, judgmental, insensitive. How do you feel entering that situation? What do you imagine your time will be like? Our anticipation, our prediction of how kind others are directly impacts our openness to our sensibility, our sense of hope. So this is the lead into our theme for this week and next. It's the power of what I call wise hope. And I'm going to share with you in the form of a two-part series that I've chosen from the archives. And my hope is that you'll find this meaningful and uplifting on your own path and in relating to our larger world. We're going to be reflecting tonight on the role of hope, the role of hope on the spiritual path. And by that I mean really the trust in our unfolding lives, the trust in this living world. And I'd like to begin that with a classic story of a big tough samurai who once went to see a very little monk. And he said in a voice that was accustomed to being a babe. He said, teach me about heaven and hell. And the little monk looked up at the mighty warrior and he looked at him with utter disdain. And he said, teach you about heaven and hell. I couldn't teach you about anything. You're dirty. You smell. Your blades rust. You're disgrace and embarrassment to the samurai class. Get out of my sight. I can't stand here. So the samurai is completely furious and he gets all red in the face and he pulls out his sword, his speeches with rage and he's about to slay the little monk. And the monk says, that's hell. So the samurai is now overwhelmed with the compassion and the surrender of this little monk who really was willing to sacrifice his life to convey this teaching and show him hell. And he puts down his sword and you can sense he's filled with gratitude. He's suddenly deeply peaceful. And the little monk said, and that's heaven. What I like about this story is that the wake up of the samurai comes so clearly from that flash of all. There's goodness in this life. There's connection. There's heart. There's something really basic here that I can trust. And so heaven is that experience of that connectedness, of touching into that basic goodness and trusting that basic goodness. And what it does is it allows us to move through the world open and available. That's the gift. Hell is believing in separateness. It's that sense that something's intrinsically wrong with me, with you, that there's a threat because there's just nothing really okay in this universe. In some basic way, it's hell's a dangerous miserable place. There's nothing okay. And one of the illustrative stories is of a man dying and going to hell and Satan reached him and chose him three doors. There's a lot of these types of stories, but this is one of them. You have to spend the rest of eternity in one of these three rooms. And I look in each one and just decide which one you're going to do it in. And the guy opens the first door and sees a bunch of people sending on their heads on a wooden floor looking very uncomfortable. And he opens the second door and he sees a bunch of people sending on their heads on a concrete floor looking even more uncomfortable. Finally, he opens the third door and he sees a bunch of people sitting around chatting and drinking coffee. They're up to their knees and shit, but they're seeming to have a nice time. And it goes, hmm, that doesn't look great, but it's better than the other two. I'll take the third door. So Satan smiles and shows a man. Ten minutes later, Satan walks back into the room and says, all right, coffee breaks over. Everybody back on your heads. That's a pretty bad one, isn't it? But the idea is this, that the worst part of hell is that sense of eternity, that things are bad and they're never going to get better. It's the lack of hope. And that's what causes depression. That we are life energy sinks because there's a sense, and this is the hellishness of depression, that there's nothing ahead that we can count on. There's no intrinsic goodness or hopefulness in this universe. And so when there's no hope, we then end up moving through life in this closed, defended way, anticipating trouble or depressed and cut off from life, or aggressive and needlessly attacking little monks, something like that. So hope is a sense of potential. In a very simple way, hope is a sense in our body and mind that there's potential. There's potential to evolve. There's a potential to realize a sense of belonging, of connection. So what I'd like to do in these two talks is explore the value and importance of hope, the shadow side of hope, because there's hope that can be very egoic and grasping. And then look at what it is that cultivates a liberating kind of hope. But Hamida leaves one of the teachers that's really, I found very powerful, describes this holy hope. So maybe to start, let's take a moment to reflect. We'll take stock a little, just since where you are in this domain that we're exploring. You might close your eyes and take a few full breaths. And let your intention be as you check in to bring some interest and honesty to what your experience is without any judgment. Just a sense, if you really watch yourself and your moods and your emotions, if you sense really, are you a hopeful person? If you take in all the different ups and downs of politics and societal shifts and ups and downs in your personal life, and just sense your basic view of the universe, do you consider yourself to be a hopeful person? And if we look that in terms of very hopeful, moderately hopeful, or not hopeful at all, and keep your eyes closed, I'd like to do a hand raise. And who considers yourself here very, very hopeful, very much sense of the potential of everything? I can just check. And how many of you consider yourself in the medium level? That's more. How many low level? Low level hope. Good number also. So I can't quite give you the percentages right now. You can open your eyes. But I would say it was kind of 60, 30, 10. So the 30 was high, the 60 was medium, the 10 was low. That's my best take. I'll ask for someone else to check that out at some time. Hope matters. It makes a difference in how we experience our life, our physical being, our emotional being, our spiritual being. And there's a book on hope that was written by Shane Lopez. It's called Making Hope Happen. He did a lot of studies on the effect of hopefulness. And there's a lot from positive psychology on it also. So just to give you a taste of some of those studies on an emotional level, it's found that hope actually gives a certain kind of resilience in the face of stress, so that it's like a buffer when things are really the negative effects of stress, anxiety, and so on. It buffers that a little. And studies of workers show that hopeful employees experience more well-being. This is all intuitively makes sense. And of course, the opposite is when there's hopelessness, it's a predictor of suicide. You can't live without hope. There's that question. Have you ever seen a hopeless happy person? No. A story I loved about James Whistler, the painter. This took place in the early 1850s. He spent a very short and it was academically unsuccessful period at West Point. You might not know that at the US military academy. And the story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge, he drew a romantic stone one complete with a bass, grassy banks, and two small children fishing from it. And so his instructor says, get those children off that bridge. This is an engineering exercise. So Whistler got the kids off the bridge and drew them fishing from the bank of the river, resubmitted the drawing. The angry instructor yells, I told you to remove those children. Get them completely out of the picture. So here's the final version, the creative, because the creative urge was too strong in him. The last version had the children buried under two small tombstones on the river bank. Probably got kicked out soon after. But what just intrigues me is that the sense of aliveness we have, has to sense hopefulness, has to sense generativeness, creativity. So when there is no hope on a physical basis, our health goes down. Many of you follow the placebo studies that show that if you're hopeful, those with hope heal better. Like all mindsets, it affects your neurochemistry and releases brain endorphins that release pain, reduce pain, strengthen immune system when there's hope, as well as respiration and circulation motor function. So no hope, and we lose our will to live. On a behavioral level, when there's hope, it promotes healthy behaviors. In other words, if we have hope about what's possible, we end up going for it. Going to Shane Lopez, he says, hope promotes healthy behaviors, including fruit and vegetable consumption, regular exercise, safe sex practices, and quitting smoking. It's all a good thing. But we can sense that. If we sense the possibility of really learning something, we'll study. And if we sense the possibility of intimacy, we'll take more of a chance to be old, then, we're vulnerable, or listen more deeply. And if we sense the possibility of spiritual awakening, we'll give more of our energy to really quieting and collecting, training our heart and mind. Hope sets us on the course. So it matters. And we're also wisely warned against certain kinds of hope. So I want to go there next. And our hopefulness becomes a kind of shadow. You might think of it as an ego with hope. That's really a kind of grasping type of hope. T.S. Eliot said, I told my heart to be still and wait without hope. For hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Do you understand that? That we end up narrowing our sights and hoping for something real particular to go a certain way. That's not the evolved kind of hope we're talking about. Pemma Chaudrin puts it this way. She says hope. And she's talking about this kind of grasping hope and fear, which is the other side of it, from feeling that we lack something. They come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope and hope robs us of the present moment. Okay. So there's a certain kind of hope that the shadow side of hope that we're grasping after things to be a certain way. And we get cheerfully optimistic when the stock markets go up. When we get a promotion or the success of one of our children and we lose hope when we've gotten criticized on the job or in some way we're unable to, you know, the rent goes up. We can't get pregnant when we want to get pregnant. Car breaks down. So there's this roller coaster that we're on. And that's a sign of the shadow side of hope, a kind of more of an egoic hope. It gets captured best by that real famous Taoist story where a Chinese farmer gets a horse and it runs away. And the neighbor says, that's bad news. Farmer replies, good news bad news. Who can say, of course, the horse comes back and brings another horse with them. Good news, you might say. The farmer gives a second horse to a son who rides it, but thrown and badly breaks his leg. Okay. So sorry for your bad news as the concern neighbor. Good news bad news who can say the farmer replies because in a week or so after that the emperors men come and take every able bodied young man to fight in the war. And of course the farmer's son is spared. Good news bad news, good news bad news. And I suspect many of you have had that experience. I certainly have where something happens and right in the moment it feels like it's one of those bad things, but something in us and gets it that life is bigger than that. And that we just don't know what leads to what. And when we can put down the bad news, good news, there's a different kind of hope that awakens. And it's from it's a soulful kind of hope. But we first have to put down that sense of being hitched to things being a certain way, including being hitched to our health, our bodies. There's a story about final wishes where Catholic priests, the Protestant minister and the rabbi are discussing what they most hope people would say after they die when their bodies are open on display and a casket. So the priest says, I would like someone to say he was a righteous man and honest man and a very generous and the minister says, I would like someone to say he's very kind and fair and he was good to his parishioners. And the rabbi says, I would hope someone will say, oh look, he's moving. One more, I want to give you one more kind of example of the shadow side of hope. And that is magical thinking. And it's not that uncommon, that kind of delusional thinking where there's a lot of day dreaming and fantasizing. It's kind of an avoid and or escapist thing. Always coming up with new ideas of how to make a fortune or million new strategies and kind of denying limitations. And so it gets passive and conceptual and without a lack of, it's a lack of follow-up. It's just kind of dreamy hope. I suck cartoon with a dog who a fair and a fairy and a fairy is offering the dog any wish and the dog says, any wish at all? I wish we could play fetch with your wand nonstop for 100 years. That's the fantasizing mind. So let's reflect for a moment. Just check in. When you get hopeful, what's the context? What's it like? What are you hopeful about? Is it a kind of egoic hope where you're looking ahead and you're hopeful that something particular is going to go your way? Let that job or the raise or someone's approval. One of the signs of that is that it's always comes bound with fear of it not happening, that you would not be okay with it not happening. What do you notice about your own quality of hopefulness? As you reflect, it's helpful to know that if what you found is, yeah, my hopes are kind of hitched to things being a certain way. There is, within that, still a pure strain of openness to possibility that can unfold itself into a more powerful and liberating and mature hope. That's in there. It just helps to notice where your hope has gotten tight or small. So you can keep your eyes closed if you'd like or open them. What I'd like to do is propose a way of understanding hope that has three basic characteristics and that as we evolve these three characteristics, our hope becomes more of that holy hope, that soulful hope. The three characteristics are, the first is that there's an aspiration towards our highest potential, that hope is grounded in that. An aspiration towards really manifesting our highest potential. There's a trust, this is characteristic too, that it's possible. There are possibilities there. The third is that there's an energy to engage, to support that manifesting. There's a dynamic quality to hope. Vaklo Havill describes this evolved hope that I'm talking about as an attribute that we carry in us always. It's a state of being, it can get covered over, but it's there. It's a dimension of soul. So let's look at each of those characteristics one by one. The first one is that quality of aspiration. If you're scanning to sense, well, is there hopefulness right here in me? It's one of the big sign points is, well, is there a sense of being connected with a true aspiration, with a sense of what really matters to you? Does this, it might express as the aspiration to love or to serve or to create like a flower hopes to blossom, acorn hopes to become an oak. It's like that aspiration to really become all we can be. And sometimes it expresses as vision. The Hebrew prophets warn that without vision, people perish. So we, this is a quarrel and a hope. We need to have vision or aspiration. And to give you an example of the power of this, I read an article in the New Yorker a few years ago. And it was about Japan. And in Japan, there is twice as much suicide as there is in the United States, which would say there's a lot of hopelessness. And it's, I think it's one person every 15 minutes. So there's a young monk, his name is Nemoto, who's been working with the suicidal people in Japan. And he does a workshop. And a key part of the workshop is an exercise where he says, okay, imagine this, you've got three months to live, you've been diagnosed with cancer. What do you want to do? And then he says, now you have, he starts with three months, and he says now you have one month, and now you have one week, and then you have 10 minutes. And so people have a blank piece of paper, and they're right again. So what do you want to do with these last, you know, months or weeks or minutes? And you might decide, oh, I want to be more loving or help more, be creative with my poetry that I've never manifested. So one man was participating in this, and his paper was blank, he couldn't write anything, and he was weeping, because all he had done was fixate on wanting to die, not what he'd do if he lived. And then he realized, well, if he hadn't really lived, how could he want to die? And there's something about that insight that was freeing, because he returned to his job, and he began to be able to speak more. He had been really adverse to talking, and his life was free to unfold. So we might not be suicidal, but it's often that we're, happens that we're really not remembering a deeper, compelling aspiration in a embodied way, what we really care about. And there's a depression that comes with that. When we get disconnected from a real, that kind of stream of passion that lives through us that really wants to manifest all we can be, you can sense for yourself that if you knew that this was the last, let's say, month of your life, how much of the activity and the way of paying attention that happened today would be aligned with what you really think matters. Are we living our days as if they really count in our life? And to the degree that it's really removed, there's going to be a disconnection from heart and from hope. So the reconnecting, the reconnecting is to get in touch with our aspiration, and it's a practice. I had one friend who, we were talking and she was very, very anxious and kind of shut down a certain way. And so I said, well, what's something you're really hoping for right now? And she said, well, I have research I'm doing. I really want to publish in a top journal. That might be called, you know, like if she's hoping for something that's kind of a narrow hope, get it published. So I deepened the inquiry. I said, what is, would be so important about that? That's how you deepen your inquiry. Well, why does that matter? What would that give you? And she said, well, if it got published in a top journal that would help validate the protocol for trauma that I'm working on, I said, okay, and what would be so important about that? What would that serve? And she said, well, it would really help people heal. And I said, ah, so that's what really matters to you. Feel that aspiration that you can help people heal and feel it in your body. And as soon as she started feeling that truth, that that's what she really wanted, she started softening and opening. She really started coming home into herself. So it's not grasping to the particular. She was connected with the deep longing. Three Norsaga Dada said, one of my favorite teachers. She says, your wants are too small. Make them larger. Make them deeper. Make them more encompassing. Okay, so that's the first one. If we want to wake up a deeper level of hoping, it's to connect with a deep aspiration. What is it we really long for? That's what evolves hope. The second is a trust that it's possible. Okay, do you trust that it's possible for you to manifest your heart's potential to love? Your mind's potential to be fully awake, just to see clearly. Can you manifest your potential to really be intimate with others? Do you have some trust that that's possible? That's the second part. And there's a phrase that Shane uses. He says, you can only get there from here. That the trust is that by being fully here, that's what allows us to manifest. And again, the metaphor of a acorn and an oak. That an acorn has an urge toward becoming an oak. The oakness is embedded. It's already here. It's guiding the unfolding. Your true nature is already here guiding the unfolding. And your David the Rose says, though, I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been. I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I'm prepared to expect wonders. One way to consider this, and I find this really powerful, is to sense that your future self, the oak tree, is calling you to manifest. That your future self is here, energetically calling you to become all that you can be. It's drawing you into your fullness. And I can share for myself a story that kind of tuned me into this in a very profound way during, I've shared often that I had about eight years of pretty chronic and sometimes acute illness. And I found that I did that ego roller coaster of hope, where on days that I could walk a little bit further and I wasn't so fatigued, I'd go, oh, I'm getting better. And my hopefulness would start blossoming out there. And then I'd have a few days in a row where I just exhausted and I couldn't even move up even an incline and any of the stretching I did seemed to injure me. And then I just deflated defeated. So that was going on for a while because I had a very difficult stretch where I wasn't moving well and I could watch how it was becoming, you know, without hope. And I sat there and I just sensed to myself, I really want to be able to trust in love, in presence, in the goodness of life, regardless of whether things are temporarily up or down. And so I called on the wisest part of my being. And I said, okay, please, may the wisest, most loving part of my being just remind me, may I trust this? And I kind of imagined my future self. I imagined the self that was more mature and more evolved, more awake than this person doing the rollercoaster. I said, teach me about how to be at peace however it is. You know, the person that was maybe, you know, down the road 10 years. And it wasn't like I was imagining a physical self as much as kind of an energetic, wise, space of awareness that had manifested more. And so I actually sensed it lurking and I just said, okay, film me. Let me sense what it's like to be my most evolved self. And it was like my awake awareness was calling me. So I just filled myself with it. And when I was in my room at that point, because I wasn't even able to go down to the river where I usually walked on this very flat path, I had to stay home. And when I opened my eyes, the light was kind of, the sun was really kind of reflecting off the leaves of a fern that was hanging in my room. And the leaves, I could see the precision and the magic and the mystery of just this simple ordinary fern leaf that to me was like divine. And I realized that when I called on my future self, my evolved self right now was entirely not just okay, it was filled with the sacred. So that became more and more of a practice of what I now is calling on my fearless heart or bodhicitta, the awakened heart mine. But I funded helpful sometimes to think of it as our future self, what we're evolving into. Just to call on that and it's there. And that was the power of the realization was that what I was calling on was already here. And that's where trust comes in that you can trust you're evolving because the seeds of your Buddha nature are already here and you can contact them. Okay. So there's aspiration. There's trusting that who you're becoming, the seeds are already and always right here. You can only get there from here. The third area that I mentioned is that we engage, that we get active towards that manifestation, that we dedicate energy. And if you trust that's already here, it actually enables action. So if you long for freedom, you'll dedicate more to the practices of waking up from mental stories. And if you long for love, you'll dedicate yourself more to relationships. And if you long for serving in the world, you'll act to heal our earth, we'll reduce social injustice. And the trick is, and this is interesting and you know this, if you know much about depression, is that if you get active, it starts lifting depression. It's an outside-in effect. So I've named the three pieces, and I'm going to tell you a story now, again, from the Monomoto. But I want to remind you of the three pieces you can listen as remembering them. The first is aspiration that you remember, oh, I care about this. The second is there's some sense of trust that something's possible. And the third is that you engage energetically. So for the Monomoto, he, at one point, got very sick. After spending a number of years working with suicidal people, he'd respond to every message anybody sent to him. He was absolutely 24-7 on the job. And when it got sick, people didn't really reach out to him. And people, you know, he got these kind of responses like, well, I need help. I don't need to be waiting for you to get better. He was really surprised. It was very isolating. But he decided he hadn't been doing something right, and that he really needed to change the way he worked with people. And so he decided that he was going to insist that anybody that want to work with him come to his temple, which wasn't an easy thing to do. It was hours away from, wasn't easy to public transportation. You had a walk to get there. But he set it up that way. Far fewer people came to work with him. But those that did had a much more deep kind of transformation. So he describes this. He says, once a man walked for five hours to get to the temple. Now the walk was a kind of heroic journey for this man because he'd been living as a shud in. And shud in means he'd never leaving the house. Now suddenly he was outside in the sun. He was sweating, feeling his body move. And as he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he'd really spoken to anyone. And now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked. And when it last after five hours, he arrived at the temple. He announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nemoto's help. And he turned around and he walked home. So what happened? Okay. Well, first, he recognized that he wanted healing. He had aspiration. And he had some trust, some sense of possibility. And it was through the monk's energy. The monk gave him that hope that something was possible. And by the way, trust is contagious. You sometimes might run into somebody that has touched into a certain kind of healing or has a certain kind of devotion or certain kind of faith themselves. And it's contagious in a good way. It lets you sense, oh, this really is possible. So that just being in that kind of a field with Nemoto, that faith was there. And then he dedicated energy, that hope activated him in a way that he sensed his body kind of life. He had a reconnect with the flow. And in that process, he had found what he already needed. And a very biophysical level, hope was there. This is Barbara King's solver. Here's what I've decided. The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right under it, under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it. Every kindness. I've been teaching now for 40 years. So I've watched a lot of people start and stop or kind of plateau, get habituated on the path. But the ones that have really kept unfolding in a really creative way that have kept really waking up their hearts and minds. These are the three qualities or characteristics that I've seen in them. Staying really in touch with aspiration. So today does feel that far removed from how you'd want to live your life if you didn't have long. There's a being in touch with what really matters. And then a trust in what's possible, a trust that the love that we long for and the wisdom, it's already here that our future self is calling us. And it's seeded in our being and our consciousness already. There's a trust in what we're evolving into. And then the third, there's energy that's engaged in that waking up process. So I'd like to walk through that in a short way right now. I think you'll find it helpful to take it from words to really applying it right as we're here together. So take some moments, if you will, to adjust your sitting. Use your sitting comfortably. And take a few nice full breaths and let yourself collect your attention, your energy with the breath, breathing in fully, exhaling slowly. Let it go. A few full breaths. And then as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm, you might feel it in the area of the heart, listening to and feeling your heart, sensing that inquiry that if you were at the end of your life looking back, what would most matter? What would matter about how you live today? You're at the end of your life looking back. What would matter about the quality of your attention or presence or heart right in this moment? What matters? You might sense your future self further along towards the end of your life, the self or being that's manifested more fully the love that's here and the wisdom that that future self is calling you. You might sense how that future self is experiencing this moment. You might sense what the future self, this awakeness in you really wants you to remember and trust. Listening to the message or wisdom of your future self on what you can trust. Using the ways that your future self, this awakened heart, mind are already here. The third characteristic which is engaging, what step, this moment or this next moment or tomorrow will most serve as you continue to evolve to manifest who you are. What's important? What might be one distinct way that you can engage energetically that would support this path manifesting, become in all of who you are. The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for and the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance but live right in it under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it, elementary kindness. So we close with a simple prayer this evening that all beings might remember the depth of their longing, that deep aspiration for awareness, for love, for aliveness. That all beings might trust the heart and consciousness that's always and already here and that we may live from the fullness and depth of who we are. Namaste and thank you for your attention.