Tara Brach

By Tara Brach

What's Tara Brach about?

Tara Brach, Ph.D is an internationally known meditation teacher and author of bestselling Radical Acceptance and True Refuge. Tara shares a weekly guided meditation and talk that blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices. The podcast addresses the value of mindfulness meditation and self-compassion in relieving emotional suffering, serving spiritual awakening and bringing healing to our world.

4.8

6,152 ratings

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Cultivating a Courageous He...

01.22.2021

In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding—to ourselves, ...

Tara Brach episodes:

01.22.2021 Cultivating a Courageous Heart - Part 2 (2021-01-20) In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding—to ourselves, ...
01.21.2021 Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence (2021-01-30) Our thoughts keep us removed from this living world. This guided practice invites us to open and relax with the moment to moment experience of our senses. It includes a poem by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, “Whereever you are, Find a Trail.”
01.15.2021 Cultivating a Courageous Heart - Part 1 (2020-01-13) In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding - ...
01.14.2021 Meditation: Reconnecting to Silence and Presence (2021-01-13) Only in silence and presence do we realign with what matters to our hearts. This simple practice of arriving in an embodied awareness supports us in touching the grounds of true transformation and healing. It closes with a powerful poem ...
01.08.2021 The Three Refuges - Gateways to Awakening (2021-01-06) We all seek refuge, a sense of safety or homecoming amidst the uncertainties of life. Our way of finding refuge can either imprison or free us. This talk explores the false refuges that entrap us in feeling separate and endangered, ...
01.08.2021 Meditation: A Present Heart (2020-01-06) One translation of mindfulness, in Chinese, is “present heart.” In this guided meditation we begin by awakening through the body and the senses, and then open the attention to the changing flow of experience. The intention is to meet whatever ...
12.31.2020 Repairing Our Hearts - Healing with the RAIN of Compassion (2020-12-30) Living in a fear-based society fuels the trance of separation and unworthiness. This talk explores how we can bring an engaged compassionate presence to the suffering of this trance—in our inner work, and more broadly, in healing our culture (from ...
12.31.2020 Meditation: RAIN of Self-Compassion (2020-12-30) One of the great sufferings is turning on ourselves with judgment and/or self-aversion. This practice brings the acronym RAIN to this pain. It helps us cultivate a healing self-compassion, and the realization of who we are beyond any limiting story ...
12.25.2020 “Good Othering” – Helping Each Other Trust the Gold (2020-12-23) One of the great gifts we can offer is being a mirror of goodness, reminding one another that we can trust our essential awareness, light and love. Because our conditioning is to fixate on flaws, “good othering” takes intention and ...
12.24.2020 Meditation: Meeting life with a Kind Presence (2020-12-23) This practice guides us to a receptive, kind presence by starting with listening, and moving through a body scan. We then rest in an open awareness, responding to whatever arises with a gentle attention.
12.18.2020 Heart to Heart: A Conversation Between Dan Gottlieb and Tara Brach (2020-12-16) This very real and human interchange touches on pain, loss, love, gratitude and much more.
12.17.2020 Meditation: Coming Home to Heartspace (2020-12-16) Our pathway to our hearts is through presence. This meditation helps us awaken presence through our body and all our senses. We then open to the awareness that can meet whatever arises with tenderness and kindness. This meditation includes a ...
12.12.2020 Remembering Our Belonging – Part 2 (2020-12-09) Our deepest suffering comes from feelings of separation, and as a species, our great task is realizing our belonging—to our bodies and hearts, to each other, to the living web of all beings, to formless loving awareness. These two talks ...
12.10.2020 Meditation: Yes to Our Moments (2020-12-09) When we open without resistance to the changing flow of aliveness, we discover the formless presence that is our true home. This meditation guides us through a body scan and then opening to all sounds, sensations and emotions with the ...
12.04.2020 Remembering Our Belonging, Part 1 (2020-12-02) Our deepest suffering comes from feelings of separation, and as a species, our great task is realizing our belonging—to our bodies and hearts, to each other, to the living web of all beings, to formless loving awareness. These two talks ...
12.03.2020 Meditation: Embodied Love (2020-12-02) This meditation guides us through a scan, to awaken a healing and openhearted presence throughout our body. We then widen to our full field of awareness, including whatever wants attention in an open, inclusive loving presence.
11.27.2020 Authentic Thanks Giving (2020-11-25) How do we awaken our natural capacities for gratitude and generosity? This talk explores the pathways of honest presence and purposeful cultivation, and offers several reflections that guide us in contacting and expressing our love (a favorite Thanksgiving talk from ...
11.26.2020 Meditation: Yes to Life (2020-11-25) After relaxing our bodies and quieting our minds, this meditation guides us to open to the changing experience of being alive. We ask ourselves two questions: “What is Happening Inside me?” and “Can I be with this?” By learning to ...
11.20.2020 The Stories that Empower Us: A Conversation between Tara Brach and Elizabeth Lesser (2020-11-18) Whether we know it or not, our daily lives take direction from myths and tales that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. During their time together, Tara and Elizabeth will speak about how these origin tales have shaped our ...
11.19.2020 Meditation: The “Do No Harm and Take No S***” Practice, by Guest Elizabeth Lesser (2020-11-18) This practice-based on an ancient Buddhist meditation - bears the name of needlepoint I found in my sister's office after she died. She was a nurse, and as such had taken the oath all medical practitioners take: to do no ...
11.13.2020 “Play a Greater Part” – Bodhisattva for Our Times During scary and uncertain times, the habitual reflex is to try to find ground by creating stories about what’s happening and hardening into us-them blame. This only perpetuates the aggression and violence that is so prevalent in our societies. This ...
11.12.2020 Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is (2020-11-11) This meditation awakens the senses with a mindful scanning of the body, establishes an anchor for presence, and invites us to arrive again and again, deepening the pathway home. When difficult or intense experience arises, the practice is to learn ...
11.07.2020 Our Refuge of Heartspace (2020-11-04) Amidst the great emotional reactivity of our times, this talk looks at: How do we hold this? What will allow us to respond wisely to our hurting world? How can we widen the circles of compassion? Our time includes a ...
11.05.2020 Meditation: Refuge in Living Presence (2020-11-04) This meditation guides us to rest in the aliveness of the changing stream of sensations, sounds and feelings. As we open to the awareness that includes all life, we touch the peace, stillness and wakefulness that is our essence. We ...
10.30.2020 Change, Loss and Timeless Love (Part 2) (2020-10-28) Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely intertwined with how we relate to change and loss. These two talks are an invitation to look honestly, and without judgment, at the ways, we resist facing our fears and grieving ...
10.30.2020 Instruction and Meditation: Pathway to Non-Doing Presence (2020-10-27) While meditation begins with purposeful collecting of attention, it leads to non-doing presence, to Being. In this guided practice, we arrive in presence through a body scan and attention to the breath, open the attention to changing experience, and then ...
10.29.2020 Meditation: Suffering and Compassion (2020-10-28) This brief meditation is a version of the Tibetan Tonglen practice: With the support of the breath we allow ourselves to open to the realness of suffering, and then offer it into a boundless heartspace…a shared and compassionate awareness.
10.24.2020 Healing Racialized Trauma: A Conversation with Resmaa Menakem and Tara Brach (2020-10-21) The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Resmaa Menakem speaks in a compelling way how this destruction will continue until Americans ...
10.22.2020 Meditation: Letting Life Live Through You (2020-10-21) We unconsciously tense against the energetic life of the present moment. This meditation guides us in relaxing and opening to the full aliveness and awareness that animates our being.
10.16.2020 Change, Loss and Timeless Love (Part 1) (2020-10-14) Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely intertwined with how we relate to change and loss. These two talks are an invitation to look honestly, and without judgment, at the ways we resist facing our fears and grieving ...
10.15.2020 Meditation: Listening to Our Heart (2020-10-14) True listening arouses an open receptive presence that can be truly healing. This meditation awakens a listening presence; first bringing that receptive awareness to sensations and sounds, and then offering that presence to the tenderness and vulnerability of our heart.
10.09.2020 Meditation: Uprooting Limiting Beliefs with RAIN (2020-09-23) This short reflection guides us in using RAIN (recognize-allow-investigate-nurture) when we discover we are caught in a limiting belief. Who would you be if you didn’t believe there was something wrong with you? (an excerpt from the full talk, Freedom ...
10.09.2020 Meditation: Letting Go and Letting Be (2020-10-03) We leave presence by contracting into thoughts and resisting the changing flow of life. This meditation guides us in gently releasing thoughts and opening to this mysterious life, just as it is.
10.08.2020 Your Future Self: Turning Towards Your Awakened HeartMind Our lives are shaped by our evolutionary past – the fears and wants that arise from a separate self sense – and the pull of our evolutionary potential – our awakened heart and mind. This talk explores the power of ...
10.02.2020 Equanimity: The Gifts of Non-Reactive Mindful Presence (2020-09-30) If we want to bring our intelligence, creativity and love into our relationships and world, we need to be able to access an inner refuge of presence. This talk explores how, when we’re reacting from anger, clinging or fear, to ...
10.01.2020 Meditation: Pathway to Inner Peace (2020--09-30) “Peace is this moment without judgment,” writes poet Dorothy Hunt, “this moment in the heart-space where everything that is, is welcome.” This meditation is a guide to opening to the truth of what’s here, and meeting it with a gentle, ...
09.25.2020 Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs (2020-09-23) (dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg) - We suffer when we are caught in beliefs of our own or other's badness, unworthiness, or lack of value. These beliefs hurt our bodies, lead to violent and/or addictive behaviors, and separate us from ...
09.24.2020 Meditation: Refuge in Presence (2020-09-23) The movement from virtual reality – thoughts - to the awareness of sense-based reality is true homecoming. This meditation guides us in awakening our senses, and returning again and again to the freedom of embodied presence. We close with part ...
09.18.2020 The Four Remembrances (2020-09-16) When we attune to the reality of impermanence and death, we remember what most matters to us. But in daily life we can lose precious swaths of time in a reactive trance, on our way somewhere else, and lost in ...
09.18.2020 Meditation: Loving What Is (2020-09-12) While we might not directly love what is, there is a pathway to this inner freedom. As we explore in this meditation, we begin with allowing the changing sensations and emotions to move through us, just as they are. As ...
09.11.2020 Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering (2020-09-09) Great spiritual leaders of social movements teach that true transformation arises from realizing our interconnectedness, and the light of the divine in each being. Sadly, through human history, much suffering has come from perceiving others as bad-others. We look at ...
09.10.2020 Meditation: Meeting Life with a Spacious Heart (2020-09-09) Especially when we’re stressed, we need pathways to an allowing, kind presence. This meditation guides us to relax and open through our bodies, and then meet changing waves of experience with a sea of awareness that is intrinsically allowing and ...
09.10.2020 Guided Reflection: The RAIN of Compassion – What Is It Like to Be You Compassion is hard wired in our organism, and can be cultivated. We have the capacity for affiliative care, to tune into each other and to hold each other in our hearts. Developing this innate potential is the hope of our ...
09.04.2020 Transforming Your Relationship with Anxiety (2020-09-02) Strong anxiety frequently triggers fight-flight-freeze, our survival brain’s strategy for dealing with threats. This can become a trance that dominates our thoughts, feelings, behaviors and deepest experience of who we are. This talk explores how we get caught in reactive ...
09.03.2020 Meditation: Relaxing Back into Awareness (2020-09-02) When we are in our daily trance, we are often leaning forward, on our way somewhere else. In this meditation we are guided to relax back into the awareness that is always, already here. We explore relaxing back through a ...
08.31.2020 Meditation: Listening to our Life (2020-08-15) A receptive listening attention brings intimacy with our inner experience and our world. This meditation guides us in listening to sounds, states of mind, sensations and the deepest aspiration of our heart.
08.29.2020 Meditation: Waking up from the Dream (2020-07-25) We spend many life moments in a virtual reality of thoughts. This guided practice helps us reconnect with our senses and discover in the space between thoughts the light of awareness, the mystery of what we are.
08.28.2020 Worrier Pose – Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk) While fear is a natural part of our make up, many of us suffering when the “on” button gets jammed. This talk looks at how our fears generate habitual patterns of physical tension, anxious thinking, emotions and behaviors; and how ...
08.27.2020 Meditation: Resting in Awake Awareness This practice opens with a body scan, employing the image and felt sense of a smile to awaken awareness through the body. We then open to all the senses, and rest in the awareness that includes this changing life.
08.21.2020 Radical Love 2: Loving Ourselves into Healing (2020-08-19) Radical love sees and cherishes the sacred that lives through all beings. In this talk, we’ll look at the barrier to loving the life that is right here—what we call self—and how we can call on the light and warmth ...

Older episodes

Tara Brach

What's Tara Brach about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Tara Brach episodes:

Cultivating a Courageous Heart - Part 2 (2021-01-20)

Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence (2021-01-30)

Cultivating a Courageous Heart - Part 1 (2020-01-13)

Meditation: Reconnecting to Silence and Presence (2021-01-13)

The Three Refuges - Gateways to Awakening (2021-01-06)

Meditation: A Present Heart (2020-01-06)

Repairing Our Hearts - Healing with the RAIN of Compassion (2020-12-30)

Meditation: RAIN of Self-Compassion (2020-12-30)

“Good Othering” – Helping Each Other Trust the Gold (2020-12-23)

Meditation: Meeting life with a Kind Presence (2020-12-23)

Heart to Heart: A Conversation Between Dan Gottlieb and Tara Brach (2020-12-16)

Meditation: Coming Home to Heartspace (2020-12-16)

Remembering Our Belonging – Part 2 (2020-12-09)

Meditation: Yes to Our Moments (2020-12-09)

Remembering Our Belonging, Part 1 (2020-12-02)

Meditation: Embodied Love (2020-12-02)

Authentic Thanks Giving (2020-11-25)

Meditation: Yes to Life (2020-11-25)

The Stories that Empower Us: A Conversation between Tara Brach and Elizabeth Lesser (2020-11-18)

Meditation: The “Do No Harm and Take No S***” Practice, by Guest Elizabeth Lesser (2020-11-18)

“Play a Greater Part” – Bodhisattva for Our Times

Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is (2020-11-11)

Our Refuge of Heartspace (2020-11-04)

Meditation: Refuge in Living Presence (2020-11-04)

Change, Loss and Timeless Love (Part 2) (2020-10-28)

Instruction and Meditation: Pathway to Non-Doing Presence (2020-10-27)

Meditation: Suffering and Compassion (2020-10-28)

Healing Racialized Trauma: A Conversation with Resmaa Menakem and Tara Brach (2020-10-21)

Meditation: Letting Life Live Through You (2020-10-21)

Change, Loss and Timeless Love (Part 1) (2020-10-14)

Meditation: Listening to Our Heart (2020-10-14)

Meditation: Uprooting Limiting Beliefs with RAIN (2020-09-23)

Meditation: Letting Go and Letting Be (2020-10-03)

Your Future Self: Turning Towards Your Awakened HeartMind

Equanimity: The Gifts of Non-Reactive Mindful Presence (2020-09-30)

Meditation: Pathway to Inner Peace (2020--09-30)

Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs (2020-09-23)

Meditation: Refuge in Presence (2020-09-23)

The Four Remembrances (2020-09-16)

Meditation: Loving What Is (2020-09-12)

Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering (2020-09-09)

Meditation: Meeting Life with a Spacious Heart (2020-09-09)

Guided Reflection: The RAIN of Compassion – What Is It Like to Be You

Transforming Your Relationship with Anxiety (2020-09-02)

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Awareness (2020-09-02)

Meditation: Listening to our Life (2020-08-15)

Meditation: Waking up from the Dream (2020-07-25)

Worrier Pose – Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk)

Meditation: Resting in Awake Awareness

Radical Love 2: Loving Ourselves into Healing (2020-08-19)

Other shows like Tara Brach: