Tara Brach

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Living Presence

When we are lost in thoughts our mind contracts, our body tightens and we disconnect from true openheartedness. The pathway home is through “relaxing back” and reopening our attention to our senses, relaxing through our body, and gently contacting the felt sense in our heart. By repeatedly relaxing back, we become increasingly familiar with the vibrancy, tenderness and openness of true presence.

Meditation: The Practice of RAIN (2019-02-06)

The acronym RAIN - Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture - guides us in bringing mindfulness and compassion to difficult emotions. With practice, we can find our way home to open hearted presence in the midst of whatever arises.

Meditation: Collecting, Unifying and Opening the Mind

Collecting, unifying and opening the mind, we begin with a listening attention, relaxing open, letting sounds wash through. Scanning through and feeling the aliveness of the body, listening to the breath. Not pushing away anything - a very open and relaxed, receptive attention. Sensing what's happening in this present moment. Closing by sensing all in the foreground and in the background - that alert inner stillness, that light of awareness, that which is our deepest, formless nature.

Meditation: Living Loving Awareness

By bringing our full attention to the aliveness in the body, we can open to the experience of interior space and the space that includes all sensations and sounds. This then allows us to perceive continuous space filled with the light of awareness. This meditation attunes us to these dimensions of awareness: continuous open space, heart space and full aliveness. We end with a Zen poem that invites us to rest in this living, loving awareness, and know it as home.

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Awareness

When we fully inhabit our body, we discover the space and wakefulness of awareness itself. In this meditation, we rest in this open awareness, and when the attention narrows into thoughts, we practice relaxing back into the openness that includes passing sounds, sensations and feelings. We close with a brief offering of lovingkindness to our own hearts and our world.

Meditation: Letting Go…Letting Be (2019-01-09)

This guided meditation invites us to imagine a clenched fist relaxing open, and explores this in releasing contractions in the body as well as the grip of thoughts. When we deeply let go and let be, our energy flows freely. We reconnect with our natural aliveness, love and awareness.

Meditation: Being the Ocean and Opening to the Waves (2018-12-31)

We can’t truly open to the waves of life unless we recognize our Oceanness, the formless awareness that is our source. This meditation begins with awakening the senses and then invites us to discover the spacious presence in the background of all experience.

Meditation: Awakening the Heart - Giving and Receiving Loving Blessings

Our hearts awaken as we express and receive love in an embodied, conscious way. This guided practice brings our attention to dear ones in our life, and explores how we discover deep communion through offering and letting in love. NOTE: This meditation is a favorite from the archives - from the end of the talk, “Bodhichitta – The Awakened Heart – Part 2.”

Three Core Capacities in Loving Fully (2018-12-19)

This talk looks at three ways of awakening our hearts—seeing goodness, feeling appreciation as a bodily experience, and expressing our care. We are then guided in developing each of these capacities by focusing our attention on someone we care about, with whom we’d like to experience our full potential for loving.

Part 2 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-12-12)

Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives - includes working with sleep issues.

Three Attitudes that Nourish a Liberating Practice

A key spiritual inquiry is, “In this moment, what most serves awakening?” Rather than a particular style of meditation practice, it is our way of relating to our experience – our attitude – that frees our hearts. This talk explores the attitudes that are an expression of our innately open, wakeful and loving awareness, and that carry us to realization.

Part 1 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-11-28)

Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives.

Authentic Thanks Giving (2018-11-21)

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.

Survival of the Nurtured - Our Path to Belonging (2018-11-14)

We flourish when nurtured with love and understanding. Yet for so many, the violence of our society and lack of attuned caretakers has severed trust and belonging. This talk explores how meditation and conscious relating with each other can restore the connections so vital to healing and spiritual freedom.

Part 2 - The Jewel in the Lotus: Cultivating Compassion (2018-11-07)

The compassion that arises from mindful awareness can heal our inner wounds, interpersonal conflict and the suffering in our world. These two talks focus on cultivating self-compassion and compassion for others. They look at the blocks to compassion and accessible powerful practices that awaken the full wisdom and tenderness of our hearts.

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 this constellation prevents us from inhabiting our full wisdom and love. We then explore two interrelated pathways of healing—unconditional presence, and resourcing, or cultivating access to safety and belonging.

Part 1 - The Jewel in the Lotus: Cultivating Compassion (2018-10-24)

The compassion that arises from mindful awareness can heal our inner wounds, interpersonal conflict and the suffering in our world. These two talks focus on cultivating self-compassion and compassion for others. They look at the blocks to compassion and accessible powerful practices that awaken the full wisdom and tenderness of our hearts.

Part 2 - Rewiring for Happiness and Freedom (2018-10-17)

The Buddha: “I would not be teaching this (a path of awakening) if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible.” While this is our potential, we each have deep conditioning to get stuck in feelings of fear, deficiency and separation from others. We explore the two interdependent pathways of undoing the conditioning that blocks our potential. Part 2, investigating how to cultivate an unconditional presence, and radical acceptance & love, that are grounds of true happiness & inner freedom.

Part 1 - Rewiring for Happiness and Freedom (2018-10-10)

The Buddha said, “I would not be teaching this (a path of awakening) if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible.” While this is our potential, we each have deep conditioning to get stuck in feelings of fear, deficiency & separation from others. We explore the two interdependent pathways of undoing the conditioning that blocks our potential. Part 1: looks at how we can intentionally arouse states of wellbeing, and develop them into ongoing traits that bring presence and joy to our lives.

The Sacred Pause

When we are lost in the trance of doing, our lives are on automatic, and contracted by sense that something’s wrong or missing. This talk explores the challenges of learning to pause, and the blessings that arise when step out of our incessant mental and physical activity and reconnect with the being-qualities of presence, wisdom and love.

Part 2: Impermanence - Awakening Through Insecurity

From the view of the separate self, this existence is inherently uncertain, and we are profoundly vulnerable. Our habitual reaction to insecurity fuels separation, and limits our capacity to live and love fully. These two talks explore the blessings of wisdom, love and freedom that naturally arise as, instead of resisting, we learn to open directly to the insecurity of impermanence.

Part 1: Impermanence - Awakening Through Insecurity

From the view of the separate self, this existence is inherently uncertain, and we are profoundly vulnerable. Our habitual reaction to insecurity fuels separation, and limits our capacity to live and love fully. These two talks explore the blessings of wisdom, love and freedom that naturally arise as, instead of resisting, we learn to open directly to the insecurity of impermanence.

Part 2: Awakening through Anger - The U-Turn to Freedom (2015-11-18)

While we have strong conditioning to react to aggression with more aggression, we have the capacity to pause, and instead deepen attention and connect to our natural wisdom and empathy. This talk looks at how we can directly engage in this evolutionary adaptation when we encounter trauma related conflict in our personal lives, and in a parallel way when groups of people who have been part of traumatizing conflict seek reconciliation and healing. (from archives - 2015-11-18)

Part 1: Awakening through Anger - The U-Turn to Freedom

Anger is naturally triggered when we feel an obstacle to meeting our needs. How do we honor the intelligence within anger, but not get hijacked into emotional reactivity that creates suffering in our individual and collective lives? This talk explores the U-turn that enables us to offer a healing attention to the feelings and unmet needs under anger. Once present with our inner life, we are able to respond to those around us with wisdom, empathy and true strength.

Part 2: Vulnerability, Intimacy, & Spiritual Awakening

We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this unlived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization. These talks explore the ways that we defend ourselves, and the pathway to gently, wisely and intelligently disarming and freeing our hearts.