Why Barbara Brown Taylor Says Running from Pain May Be Holding You Back | Super Soul Sparks

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1:18Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Talk. Those with faith the size of a mustard seed will be able to move mountains. Barbara Brown Taylor is one of America's leading theologians. When you shut off all your usual distractions, who do you discover in the quiet clearing at the center of all that noise? She's an Episcopal priest who was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2014. She holds a Masters of Divinity from Yale and has written 13 thought-provoking books on spirituality. Barbara spent 15 years as a parish minister, five of them as the head priest for a thriving congregation.

2:03When she made the decision to walk away from the pulpit, she says it opened her up to explore life's big questions. She wrote about the life-altering experience in her critically acclaimed memoir, Leaving Church. A lifelong spiritual seeker, Barbara is now a college religion professor who looks for the sacred in the most unexpected places. I have learned things in the dark I could never have learned in the light, not without falling down, not without getting hurt. Her latest book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, challenges believers and non-believers alike to probe the shadows of our lives and to embrace darkness in all its forms.

2:46So you wrote a book about leaving the church, and your latest book is really about learning to walk in the dark, which really struck me as fascinating because so many of us fear the dark. and not only do we fear the dark, you say we live a solar spirituality. Tell me what you mean by that. Solar spirituality for me is shorthand for any kind of religious faith, Christian or otherwise, that teaches me to stay in the light and flee from darkness of every kind. And it doesn't really define that for me. Emotional darkness, theological darkness, physical darkness, what kind are we talking about? But full solar spirituality wants me to ignore the dark places in my life, get out of them as fast as I can, and to avoid them if possible.

3:35But I thought, you know, until I read this book, this is why this is so fascinating, Supersoulers, that we're still evolving and growing in our knowledge of our spiritual selves. And this book introduced me to another way of being with the dark, because I'm one of those people who has feared the dark, the dark side, darkness. Don't let it get too dark. Come in before dark. And every aspect of that, particularly emotional darkness. You want to run from it. Instead, you say you are espousing that we embrace it. That's why learning to walk in the dark is the title, that we embrace the darkness. What a concept.

4:23It's half your life. whether it's day night or your emotional life, but it seems to me I have spent a lot more energy trying to manage and avoid that time than I have wondering what might be there for me. My shorthand is I think probably the places I least want to go are the richest places for me, the richest treasures hidden there. So you're saying that this whole, really, obsession that we have with being in the light, you know, I call all of the owners the carriers of the light. What I want to do with this network is drop pieces of light into people's life. Because I don't want to bring darkness.

5:03But you're saying we should embrace it. Why? I think in some ways you and I could have a long conversation about what we mean by light and dark. What do we put in those folders? Okay. It's just when I examine my experience as a human being, it's a lot of the places I would call the places of unknowing. If you say, what do you mean by a dark place, a place of unknowing? Either when I entered voluntarily, I traveled to another country, I became a parent. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be in Beijing. I don't know how to be a mother. Involuntarily, my doctor calls me and says, are you sitting down?

5:37I have some bad news for you. Or my father dies. Involuntarily. Or divorce. Yeah. Or your kids get into trouble. All these unknowings that we get plunged into. And because we don't know what we're doing, we think we've just failed. This is defeat. We need to get out of this as fast as possible. Handle this. Move back into the light. And all I'd like to say is just take three breaths. Three breaths to be in this place of unknowing. And feel your way around and see if there isn't somewhere in here. I don't want to feel my way around because it's scary. I know. And if we continue to live responding out of fear, I just don't, I don't know how big, my soul would be the size of a pea if I never did anything.

6:18I try to do one thing that scares me every day. That's what real courage is, is being scared and taking action anyway. You have to practice it. You have to practice courage. So how else are we going to practice it? Okay. So you're saying sort of roll around in it. Take three breaths. Just three. Okay. So the next time something happens that's scary. Yeah. No matter what that is, how big or small, that puts you into the dark side. Because, you know, Marianne Williamson said in her book, Return to Love, we're either moving in the direction of love or moving in the direction of fear. When something shows up in your life that causes that fear to rise, take three breaths in the moment that it shows up.

6:57And then what? I do a little critical thinking. I think about how did I learn to be afraid of where I am right this minute? And then all of my fear is like a blue flashing light saying there's something here to pay attention to. So do you want to go to sleep or do you want to look? And it seems to me more and more, insofar as I'm able, and believe me, there are times when everything in me says run, and I run. There's something in me that knows when it's too much to handle. Instinct. Instinct says run, run. Okay. So this is the question. Is the divine presenting itself in the darkness? Oh, yes to me.

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9:41If you and I had the rest of the afternoon, I would probably ask you about some night you were sitting out under the stars and for a while you looked at them and you got a stomach upset, just thinking about where am I in anything this vast? And then if you took three breaths, There was a moment in which you thought, I am a flea on the back of some gigantic thing. And at this moment, I seem to be being embraced. I don't know if it ever goes there for you. But there are times when... Yeah, it does all the time. Yeah. And so that's a kind of tunnel. I cannot ever look up at the sky at night and not be in just wondrous awe about how I fit into the bigger picture of all of that.

10:21I think that's an experience of darkness. See? So does that belong in the folder? Well, in my lexicon. Huh? Uh-huh. And what about you've had some delicious times in the dark with some lovable person. Yeah. That belongs in your darkness file. You have been at some point or another faced with a situation. Mine was my father's death. I thought it would be the most awful, dark experience of my life. And it was. And in the midst of it, there was a dazzling, breathtaking clarity of knowing there was no place else I should be than there. So there are tunnels through these experiences. So what you're saying is, oh, I just had an aha.

10:59It was not quite an aha. It was an ah. Not the ha part yet, but it was an ah. So what you're saying is this culture that we live in all over the world, not just our culture, but has labeled darkness as a bad thing. And conditions that all the time. And conditions it, you know. So black is bad and white is good. darkness is bad, light is... Spirit is good, body is bad, heaven is good, earth is bad, sacred is good, secular is bad. Lot of division, lot of division, duality that I don't think is helpful and it's not true to human life. The cosmic Christ hung out on a cross to dry. On what grounds do we as his body expect any more clarity than was given him?

11:48In 1997, after five years as the first woman priest at Grace Calvary Church in rural Georgia. Barbara Brown Taylor left her growing ministry. Although she no longer has a congregation, she remains an ordained Episcopal priest.

12:07Barbara is the best-selling author of 13 books, including her latest, Learning to Walk in the Dark. I love on page 75 where you say, what if I could trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going? Isn't there a chance of being surprised by what happens next? Better than that, what if I could learn to stay in the present instead of letting my anxieties run on fast-forward, which we talk a lot about that on Super Soul Sunday, is just being in the present moment. In this moment, I'm okay.

12:45Instead of letting your mind rush to what's going to happen, worrying about what if, what if, what if, in this moment, I'm okay. All is well. Yeah. Sure. And to fast forward is to fast forward into the unknown, and then next comes the anxiety attack. So how do we learn to embrace the darkness, dark emotions in our lives? You know, I think, because this all came up for me when I moved from the city to the country, and I was locking my car door and I lived nine miles from the nearest town that had one stoplight. Nobody but raccoons were going to break into my car and I was taking a flashlight everywhere I went and it took about six months to realize these were city behaviors that I could begin to explore country behavior around the dark, which is actually where the title of the book came from.

13:33That cured me of a lot of things that were ailing me, speed, multitasking, grabbing thing at a glance And I thought, if this is true walking outside my front door at night, might this also be true at the emotional level, at the spiritual level? So you took the physical and you turned it into the metaphysical for yourself. Literally, you're saying, I'm walking around with a flashlight, I'm locking my doors and there's only raccoons, I'm doing all this behavior, learned behavior from being in the city and what I've been taught about darkness. Then you consciously said to yourself, how else am I doing that with emotional things that are happening?

14:09Sure, and the emotional is pretty easy. I'm a big reader, though, and it always helps when somebody names something for me. And I got a great big fat book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. Whoa. And it was written a long time ago. Spare me from that. You really don't want it. But I did find out that's a good word for me, is I have a high propensity to melancholy. And whatever that's about, my cure for melancholy was to quick get back to my yoga class and start watching comedies. and to get out of my melancholy as quickly as possible. And while I was working on this book, I very carefully boundaried it, but I thought, no, I'm going to take 30 minutes a day to be melancholic and to see what my sadness is about.

14:50What is it I'm sad about? Yeah, but how much is too much? Because I think this is a fine line we walk here. So I can be with my sadness or my regret or my whatever. Whomever's watching, you know what I'm talking about. but how long can I be with that before, you know, it becomes destructive or detrimental to me? Oh, I think most of us learn warning signals, and some of them are widely publicized. When your job, your relationships, or your health begin to suffer, it's really time to get some help. Yeah. And then I have physical signals as well. So I think each of us, it would serve us well to have some idea of what our danger signals are.

15:31So what I hear you saying from learning to walk in the dark is not to run away from, you know, because we've been so trained and I, you know, tell myself, keep your vibration high. That's your number one goal in life is to keep your vibration high, stay positive. And so the minute a negative thought comes in or I start to feel blue, I try to, you know, move myself to literally a higher way of thinking, a higher vibration, so that I don't have to feel that darkness. Yes. And as you say, we spend a lot of time, our culture has a tendency to run away from sadness. What you write about sadness is the best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, tell me about it.

16:16I have all day. Now, I read that. That's on page 86. And you know, I have a school full of 300 girls who all come from, you know, some very traumatic backgrounds and there's a lot of sadness. As a matter of fact, three girls lost their parents in one week. So when you say sit down with the saddest child you know and say, tell me about it, which I have done, the tendency for me, and I know a lot of other people who are listening and watching, is that you want to be able to do something. So just to sit in the sadness and to say, okay, I'll sit here and I'll be sad with you, that's hard because you want to fix it.

17:00You want to do something. You want to make it, you want to bring some light. You do. I was just reading Maya Angelou last night and she said people will not remember what you said and they will not remember what you did, but they will never forget how you make them feel. And I think that is what I more and more try to concentrate on. When I'm with the saddest child I know, sometimes depending on the child just to say, oh baby, oh baby. And even a shared tear can be what that child remembers. So I always think about giving people permission to feel what they're feeling. And not having to do anything.

17:39No.

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