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.

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Healing Racialized Trauma: ...

10.24.2020

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 ...

Tara Brach episodes:

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 ...
08.20.2020 Meditation: A Present Heart (2020-08-19) This guided practice emphasizes bringing a gentle and kind attention to our bodies, and then including all experience with a receptive presence. We close by identifying a part of our being that is asking for a healing attention, and offering ...
08.14.2020 Learning to Respond, Not React When stressed, we often react with looping fear-thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others. This talk offers three interrelated strategies that can serve us when we’re triggered by stress, and help us find our way back ...
08.13.2020 Meditation: Cultivating an Intimate Presence This guided meditation cultivates a relaxed, gentle presence with whatever expressions of life are arising in the moment. We begin by releasing and opening through the body, and then include all sensations, feelings and sounds in an intimate, allowing presence.
08.07.2020 Radical Love: Part 1 - Reflections that Awaken our Heart (2020-08-05) Radical love arises from the purity of our awake awareness, and cuts through the delusion of being separate and not OK. It comes from and brings out our intrinsic goodness. These talks explore the barriers to this embodied, inclusive and ...
08.06.2020 Guided Meditation: Openhearted Presence (2020-08-05) This meditation guides us to arouse mindfulness through attention to our senses, and to rest in that wakefulness with a receptive and tender presence.
08.04.2020 Meditation: Tonglen - Discovering the Boundless Space of Compassion (2020-07-25) This short version of the Tibetan Tonglen practice guides us in courageously opening to the suffering within us and all beings, and allowing that suffering to be held in the formless heartspace that is our true belonging.
07.31.2020 Your Awake Heart Is Calling You As individuals and societies, we are pulled by both the insecurity of our evolutionary past, and by our awake heart, our capacity for mindfulness and compassion. This talk explores the ways we can listen to and respond to the call ...
07.30.2020 Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence Starting with scanning through the body and awakening the senses, we then rest in presence, with the breath as a home base. The meditation invites an openness to whatever arises, and a gentle kind attention if we encounter physical or ...
07.24.2020 Love and Fear During Times of War: Interview with Lama Rod Owens This is a time of darkness and war and fear lies at the heart of much of the violence we are experiencing. How do we befriend our fear and offer it permission to teach us how to move through it ...
07.23.2020 Meditation: Gateway to Natural Presence (2020-07-22) We enter a full presence through awakening our senses, and awakening to the awareness that is aware. This meditation guides us as we arouse an embodied presence, let go of any controlling, then discover the natural spaciousness and wakefulness that ...
07.17.2020 The Sacred Art of Listening Just as presence is the heart of meditation, so deep listening is at the center of all conscious, loving relationships. This talk explores how our wants and fears block listening, ways we can deepen our capacity for listening, and the ...
07.16.2020 Meditation: Listening to Life (2014-11-12) The attitude of meditation is one of engaged listening – a relaxed, receptive yet intimate attention. This meditation explores how we can listen to sounds, listen to and feel sensations, and then relax back into the ocean of awareness that ...
07.12.2020 Meditation: Healing Shame (2020-07-01) This meditation brings the clarity and self-compassion of RAIN to the suffering of self-aversion and/or shame. It helps us see the conditioning that shaped what we judge about ourselves, and helps us remember who we are beyond our habitual and ...
07.10.2020 The Heart Crosses the Abyss - Three Inner Trainings (2020-07-08) In the moments when we either resist or get possessed by our strong emotions, we are in a trance, and cut off from openhearted awareness. This talk explores the truth that “it’s not what’s happening, it’s how we’re relating.” We ...
07.09.2020 Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness (2020-07-08) This meditation begins by guiding us through a scan: to open to inner space and aliveness, then to outer space, and then continuous space, filled with the light of awareness. We explore how every experience belongs to this infinite awake ...
07.03.2020 Shame, Healing and Transformation (2020-07-01) Being at war with ourselves blocks us from evolving our consciousness and living from our hearts. This talk distinguishes between toxic and healthy shame, as well as shame about our individual self and our group identity. We explore how, with ...
07.02.2020 Meditation: Calling on Our Inner Bodhisattva (2020-07-01) We each have within us the very source of wisdom and love. This meditation calls forward that essence, our awakening heart, so we can seek guidance and nurturing for the parts of us that need a healing attention.
06.26.2020 Spiritual Hope (2020-06-24) Spiritual hope opens us to possibility and energizes us to manifest our potential for love and wisdom. In contrast to attachment or egoic hope, which is the grasping for what will benefit a separate self, spiritual hope arises from trust ...
06.25.2020 Meditation: Body and Spirit (2020-06-24) As we relax and awaken through our physical body, we discover the formless dimension of awareness or spirit that permeates all of life. This meditation includes a poem from Mary Oliver.
06.19.2020 Sustaining Our Caring (2020-06-17) All transformation arises out of love; it is the energy of caring about life that moves us toward inner, relational and societal healing. With a primary focus on our radically re-enlivened movement for racial justice and equity, this talk looks ...
06.18.2020 Meditation: Embodied Metta (2020-06-17) Lovingkindness becomes full when it is energetically experienced in our bodies. This meditation guides us in awakening the receptivity, warmth and openness of metta through our body, and then invites us to rest in the space of loving presence, as ...
06.15.2020 Meditation: Meeting Anger with Awareness (2020-06-10) When anger is held in mindfulness, it can energize us to respond wisely to challenging situations. This meditation guides us in meeting personal or societal anger with RAIN - recognize, allow, investigate and nurture. [NOTE: this meditation was given at ...
06.12.2020 Anger and Transformation (2020-06-19) The purpose of anger is to let us know there’s an obstacle to our wellbeing and to energize us to act. While natural and necessary for survival and thriving, this powerful energy often possesses us and leads to suffering. We ...
06.11.2020 Meditation: Inner Refuge of Calm (2020-06-10) In times of great stress, it’s crucial that we have pathways to quiet our minds, relax our bodies and rest in a calm, steady presence. This meditation guides us in using the breath, body scan and a home base of ...
06.05.2020 A Courageous Presence with Racism (2020-06-03) Anti-Black racism is the core wound of American culture, and we each have a role to play in fighting racism, a medicine to bring to these times. This talk explores how we can offer an honest and courageous presence to ...
06.04.2020 Meditation: Homecoming to Wakeful Presence (2020-06-03) This meditation begins with us standing in mindful movement, guiding us in awakening awareness in the body. Then in sitting practice, we open all our senses, resting in the wakeful presence that can include the changing waves of our life.
05.29.2020 Remembering Goodness: Three Gestures of Love Tara offers this favorite talk from the archives. It explores the power of forgiveness, love and gratitude in re-connecting to our light and awareness, and being able to see the sacredness that shines through everyone. Within times of crisis practicing ...

Older episodes

Tara Brach

What's Tara Brach about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Tara Brach episodes:

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)

Meditation: A Present Heart (2020-08-19)

Learning to Respond, Not React

Meditation: Cultivating an Intimate Presence

Radical Love: Part 1 - Reflections that Awaken our Heart (2020-08-05)

Guided Meditation: Openhearted Presence (2020-08-05)

Meditation: Tonglen - Discovering the Boundless Space of Compassion (2020-07-25)

Your Awake Heart Is Calling You

Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence

Love and Fear During Times of War: Interview with Lama Rod Owens

Meditation: Gateway to Natural Presence (2020-07-22)

The Sacred Art of Listening

Meditation: Listening to Life (2014-11-12)

Meditation: Healing Shame (2020-07-01)

The Heart Crosses the Abyss - Three Inner Trainings (2020-07-08)

Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness (2020-07-08)

Shame, Healing and Transformation (2020-07-01)

Meditation: Calling on Our Inner Bodhisattva (2020-07-01)

Spiritual Hope (2020-06-24)

Meditation: Body and Spirit (2020-06-24)

Sustaining Our Caring (2020-06-17)

Meditation: Embodied Metta (2020-06-17)

Meditation: Meeting Anger with Awareness (2020-06-10)

Anger and Transformation (2020-06-19)

Meditation: Inner Refuge of Calm (2020-06-10)

A Courageous Presence with Racism (2020-06-03)

Meditation: Homecoming to Wakeful Presence (2020-06-03)

Remembering Goodness: Three Gestures of Love

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