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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Belonging to Each Other – P...

10.18.2019

Mother Teresa writes that if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. These three talks explore the causes for severed belonging, and pathways to deepening the felt sense of belonging to ...

Tara Brach episodes:

10.18.2019 Belonging to Each Other – Part 2 of 3 (2019-10-16) Mother Teresa writes that if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. These three talks explore the causes for severed belonging, and pathways to deepening the felt sense of belonging to ...
10.17.2019 Meditation: Vast and Timeless Presence (2019-10-16) The pathway to inhabiting our full presence is including, with mindfulness all parts of experience. This guided meditation explores how we can open, without resistance to the changing flow of sensations, feelings, thoughts and sounds, and discover the boundless awareness ...
10.11.2019 Belonging to Each Other - Part 1 (2019-10-09) Mother Teresa writes that if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. These two talks explore the causes for severed belonging, and pathways to deepening the felt sense of belonging to ...
10.10.2019 Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (2019-10-09) The meditation begins with a period of relaxing and collecting our attention with intentional long deep breathing. We then deepen embodied presence, and widen to the awareness that includes sounds, sensations, feelings, breath, and all experience. When the mind drifts ...
10.04.2019 Spiritual Hope: Trusting Your Awakening Heart (2019-10-02) Our beliefs and understandings about reality directly impact our moment to moment experience of living. If we believe we will never change, that blocks the transformation that brings happiness and freedom. If we trust our spiritual unfolding and are open ...
10.03.2019 Meditation: Relaxing into Awake Awareness (2019-10-02) We realize our true nature by relaxing back into what is always, already here. Starting by scanning and opening through the body, we explore resting in the awareness that includes sounds, sensations and all of life. The guidance is, when ...
09.27.2019 Wise Investigation: Dissolving the Trance If we are suffering, it is because we are believing something that is not true and caught in emotional reactivity. A key tool in meditation is investigation – actively inquiring into what is happening inside us. When we investigate with ...
09.26.2019 Meditation: A Healing, Relaxing Breath This meditation guides us in collecting attention with an intentional long deep even breath, and awakening a full relaxed presence as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm. Resting fully in this presence is the gateway to deep peace and ...
09.20.2019 True Happiness: Realizing Well-Being Well being is the deep contentment that arises from a relaxed, wakeful presence. This talk explores the beliefs and habits that contract us away from presence, and several key ways we can nourish our natural capacity for happiness.
09.19.2019 Reflection: Pausing and Deepening Attention in the Face of Attachment In this short reflection, we explore how we can bring mindfulness and self-compassion to the habits of obsessing, over-consuming and hurting ourselves and others that keep us from true happiness, connectedness and peace. Listen to the full talk, "The Realm ...
09.13.2019 The Gift of Silence: Quieting the Mind Through all spiritual traditions, there is a valuing of silence and stillness. When the mind has quieted, it becomes possible to see into the truth of what we are. Yet quieting can turn into a battle with the process of ...
09.12.2019 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.
09.06.2019 Befriending Irene This talk is from 2011 after Hurricane Irene hit us with fury. Dorian is now leaving its destruction behind, just as we work with our stormy weather within. Whether you face chronic anxiety or more violent storms of fear and ...
09.05.2019 Meditation: The Blessings of Love A blessing is whatever reminds us of the sacred loving presence that shines through all of us. This meditation is a transformational practice in receiving and offering blessings. First we connect with the vulnerable tender place within us that longs ...
08.30.2019 Earth’s Crisis: On the Edge of the Roof This talk was given in 2015, yet it is as timely as ever. It views the ecological dis-ease of our planet through the lens of our evolutionary unfolding. We explore the egoic trance that has precipitated the destruction of our ...
08.29.2019 Meditation: Discovering Inner Space By imagining the space inside the body, we discover the continuous space of awareness that is the source and essence of all aliveness. This meditation is adapted from Open Focus Meditations led by Les Fehmi, Ph.D. in The Open Focus ...
08.23.2019 Good Othering - Helping Each Other Trust the Gold (2019-08-21) 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 ...
08.22.2019 Meditation: The Sea of Awareness (2019-08-21) We begin this meditation with awakening to the aliveness in our body, using the imagery of a smile, and a body scan. Then we are guided to sense the vastness of awareness and to rest in that open wakefulness, allowing ...
08.20.2019 Meditation for Fertility (2019-08-19) We can enhance our fertility by becoming more relaxed, open and welcoming of this ever creative life. We begin by connecting with the purity and sincerity of our prayer. Then this meditation guides us to awaken our bodies, open our ...
08.16.2019 Part 2 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-14) These two talks address the inquiry: How do we awaken from the contempt and hatred that causes so much suffering in our world? This second talk extends the use of these practices to situations where we’ve locked into external “bad ...
08.15.2019 Meditation: Everything Belongs (2019-08-14) This guided meditation awakens an embodied presence through a body scan, and invites us to rest in the breath, while allowing the different waves of sensations, feelings and sounds to come and go. When difficult experiences arise, we breathe with ...
08.09.2019 Part 1 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-07) Two talks address: How do we awaken from the contempt and hatred that causes so much suffering in our world? Part 1 looks at how we can use the practices of mindfulness and compassion to decondition our habits of self-blame ...
08.08.2019 Meditation: Cultivating a Kind Attention (2019-08-07) Using the image and felt sense of a smile, we scan through the body, and awaken a sense of aliveness, presence and tenderness. The practice then extends to mindfully include all sounds, sensations, and feelings; and when difficult experience arises, ...
08.02.2019 Longing to Belong: Bringing Presence through the Three Refuges Spiritual practice reveals our belonging through bringing presence to three gateways: the aliveness of the present moment, loving relatedness, and the openness and lucidity of awareness itself. This talk includes guided meditations in exploring each gateway. It ends with the ...
07.31.2019 Vipassana or Insight Meditation and Instruction: from Day 4 on Retreat Vipassana, also known as insight meditation, is training in bringing a clear mindful attention to our moment to moment experience. We begin by relaxing through the body and then resting attention with the breath – or some other sensory anchor ...
07.26.2019 The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2 (2017-07-24) Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will ...
07.25.2019 Meditation: Letting go (2019-07-24) One way of understanding meditation is a letting go of the habitual clenching of thoughts, the clenching that resists emotions and pulls away from aliveness itself. This meditation guides us in letting go, first through the body, and then practicing ...
07.19.2019 Desire: A Current of Homecoming Desire is intrinsic to our aliveness, yet when we have unmet needs, it can possess us. This talk explores how to relax open the grip of wanting and heal the suffering of addiction. You will learn how to bring mindfulness ...
07.18.2019 Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is 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 ...
07.12.2019 The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1 (2019-07-10) Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will ...
07.11.2019 Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life (2019-07-10) This meditation establishes a gentle and caring presence through bringing the image and felt sense of a smile to various domains in the body. We then settle with the breath, and practice relaxing with whatever arises, letting life be just ...
07.05.2019 How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2 The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk, we explore the importance of hope on ...
07.04.2019 Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness This meditation awakens a receptive attention to the senses, starting with physical sensations and opening to sound. Then we sense how open awake awareness is receiving the moment to moment arising and passing life. In the final part of the ...
06.28.2019 How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1 The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk, we explore the importance of hope on ...
06.27.2019 Meditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness We cut off from our aliveness when we are lost in thoughts and on auto pilot. This meditation arouses a receptivity to sensation from “the inside out,” opens the awareness to sound, and then invites a full resting in receptive, ...
06.21.2019 The Courage to Love - Part 2 (2019-06-19) The gateway to full intimacy and love is our capacity to open to vulnerability. These two talks look at our ways of avoiding vulnerability, and offer guidance in learning to contact and transform our fears into awake and loving presence.
06.20.2019 Meditation: Wakeful, Open Awareness (2019-06-19) When we awaken our senses, we can sense in the background a wakeful openness that is our true home. This meditation guides us by first attending to the space, aliveness and awareness that fills the body, and then by sensing ...
06.14.2019 The Courage to Love - Part 1 (2019-06-12) The gateway to full intimacy and love is our capacity to open to vulnerability. These two talks look at our ways of avoiding vulnerability, and offer guidance in learning to contact and transform our fears into awake and loving presence.
06.13.2019 Meditation: Effortless and Wakeful Presence (2019-06-12) Striving in meditation only creates more tension in our psyche and a solidified sense of self. This meditation invites us to awaken our senses and relax back into the presence that is always and already here. From presence we spontaneously ...
06.07.2019 An Appropriate Response: Living from an Awake Heart (2019-06-05) Much of our suffering comes from reacting to stressful situations with fear or aggression, rather than responding with wisdom and care. This talk explores the pathway of shifting from reacting to responding: this includes learning to pause, awakening the wings ...
06.06.2019 Meditation - Breath by Breath: Relaxing with Our Life (2019-06-05) The breath can be a powerful portal to presence. This meditation guides us in relaxing with the breath, including the breath in a body scan, and then allowing the breath to serve as an anchor when the mind gets lost ...
05.31.2019 Part 3 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-29) Rumi invites us to find the barriers we’ve erected against love, and a universal one is blame. These three talks are an invitation to relax those barriers, and open our hearts to our inner life and to all beings. Part ...
05.30.2019 Meditation: Opening to Life (2019-05-29) This guided meditation includes a mindful body scan, and awakening all our senses to our moment to moment experience. We relax open to the presence that is unobscured by thoughts, letting life be just as it is.
05.24.2019 Trusting the Gold (retreat talk) (2019-05-08) This talk looks at how our upbringing and culture lead us to mistrust who we are and become identified as a separate, deficient self. We then explore the practices of presence and self-inquiry that turn us toward the openness, tenderness ...
05.23.2019 Meditation: RAIN on Self-Blame (2019-04-17) One of the greatest roots of suffering is being at war with ourselves. This meditation, based on the acronym RAIN (recognize-allow-investigate-nurture), guides us in releasing the armoring of blame, and relating to our inner life with greater understanding and compassion.
05.17.2019 Compassion Towards All: Moving toward a Plant Based Diet (2019-05-15) For most of human history it’s been “normal” to eat non-human animals. This is now changing. We are awakening to the massive suffering of the billions of animals killed each day for food, the horrors of the animal-food industry, and ...
05.16.2019 Meditation: Choosing Living Presence A meditation on being present with our living, breathing life (includes chanting the Om’s in community – a favorite from Tara’s Wednesday night archives).
05.10.2019 Conscious Prayer – Finding Refuge in Loving Awareness (retreat talk) Prayer is a communing with our enlarged being. This talk examines less conscious forms of prayer, and how we can evolve the power of our prayers by opening into the depth of our longing, and reaching toward our true belonging. ...
05.09.2019 Meditation: Loving This Life – Happiness - a Metta Practice This meditation turns us toward naturally arising happiness with the image of a smile, welcoming the aliveness and presence of each moment with the spirit of “yes” and then closes with a brief lovingkindness practice. Lama Gendun Rinpoche writes, “Happiness ...
05.03.2019 Part 2 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-01) Rumi invites us to find the barriers we’ve erected against love, and a universal one is blame. These three talks are an invitation to relax those barriers, and to open our hearts to our inner life and to all beings. ...

Older episodes

Tara Brach

What's Tara Brach about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Tara Brach episodes:

Belonging to Each Other – Part 2 of 3 (2019-10-16)

Meditation: Vast and Timeless Presence (2019-10-16)

Belonging to Each Other - Part 1 (2019-10-09)

Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (2019-10-09)

Spiritual Hope: Trusting Your Awakening Heart (2019-10-02)

Meditation: Relaxing into Awake Awareness (2019-10-02)

Wise Investigation: Dissolving the Trance

Meditation: A Healing, Relaxing Breath

True Happiness: Realizing Well-Being

Reflection: Pausing and Deepening Attention in the Face of Attachment

The Gift of Silence: Quieting the Mind

Meditation: Awakening the Heart – Giving and Receiving Loving Blessings

Befriending Irene

Meditation: The Blessings of Love

Earth’s Crisis: On the Edge of the Roof

Meditation: Discovering Inner Space

Good Othering - Helping Each Other Trust the Gold (2019-08-21)

Meditation: The Sea of Awareness (2019-08-21)

Meditation for Fertility (2019-08-19)

Part 2 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-14)

Meditation: Everything Belongs (2019-08-14)

Part 1 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-07)

Meditation: Cultivating a Kind Attention (2019-08-07)

Longing to Belong: Bringing Presence through the Three Refuges

Vipassana or Insight Meditation and Instruction: from Day 4 on Retreat

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2 (2017-07-24)

Meditation: Letting go (2019-07-24)

Desire: A Current of Homecoming

Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1 (2019-07-10)

Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life (2019-07-10)

How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2

Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness

How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1

Meditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness

The Courage to Love - Part 2 (2019-06-19)

Meditation: Wakeful, Open Awareness (2019-06-19)

The Courage to Love - Part 1 (2019-06-12)

Meditation: Effortless and Wakeful Presence (2019-06-12)

An Appropriate Response: Living from an Awake Heart (2019-06-05)

Meditation - Breath by Breath: Relaxing with Our Life (2019-06-05)

Part 3 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-29)

Meditation: Opening to Life (2019-05-29)

Trusting the Gold (retreat talk) (2019-05-08)

Meditation: RAIN on Self-Blame (2019-04-17)

Compassion Towards All: Moving toward a Plant Based Diet (2019-05-15)

Meditation: Choosing Living Presence

Conscious Prayer – Finding Refuge in Loving Awareness (retreat talk)

Meditation: Loving This Life – Happiness - a Metta Practice

Part 2 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-01)

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