Tara Brach Is Coming To The Spirit Rock Meditation Center

Tara Brach on The Compassionate Brain

Tara Brach is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha and True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart.

She was one of the featured presenters in the Sounds True production of The Compassionate Brain, hosted by Dr. Rick Hanson.

On that program, Dr. Brach talked about practices for strengthening and expressing compassion and kindness and dealing with hard issues in relationships. It was here the I learned of her new book, Radical Acceptance.

Tara Brach is coming to the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California on June 2, 2013 for a daylong event on Meeting Our Edge and Softening. The event is a benefit for Spirit Rock and you can check it out here.

She says, “It’s not what’s happening… it’s how you respond.” Check out this story from True Refuge;

 One of my favorite stories took place a number of decades ago when the English had colonized India and they wanted to set up a golf course in Calcutta. Besides the fact that the English shouldn’t have been there in the first place, the golf course was not a particularly good idea. The biggest challenge was that the area was populated with monkeys.

The monkeys apparently were interested in golf too, and their way of joining the game was to go onto the course and take the balls that the golfers were hitting and toss them around in all directions. Of course the golfers didn’t like this at all, so they tried to control the monkeys. First they built high fences around the fairway; they went to a lot of trouble to do this. Now, monkeys climb…so, they would climb over the fences and onto the course . . . that solution just didn’t work at all.

The next thing they tried was to lure them away from the course. I don’t know how they tried to lure them—maybe waving bananas or something—but for every monkey that would go for the bananas, all their relatives would come into the golf course to join the fun. In desperation, they started trapping them and relocating them, but that didn’t work, either. The monkeys just had too many relatives who liked to play with golf balls! Finally, they established a novel rule for this particular golf course: the golfers in Calcutta had to play the ball wherever the monkey dropped it. Those golfers were onto something!

We all want life to be a certain way. We want the conditions to be just so, and life doesn’t always cooperate. Maybe it does for awhile, which makes us want to hold on tight to how things are, but then things change. So sometimes it’s like the monkeys are dropping the balls where we don’t want them, and what can we do?

Books By Tara Brach