Tara Brach

Meditation: Spacious Sky of Awareness - This meditation begins with a body scan that enables us to awaken our senses. We relax open fully to include the changing flow of sounds and sensations, in a spacious, open awareness. (from a morning on the 2015 New Year's silent retreat)

Making the Whole World Your Friend - A wonderful translation of the Pali word Metta is friendliness. This talk looks at friendliness through an evolutionary lens, and explores ways we can cultivate a more open heart.    

Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life - 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 as it is. The underlying intention is to regard all experience with a clear, interested and friendly attention. The gif...

Refuge in the Wilderness - Pt2 – Coming Home to Embodied Presence -  When we live from our mental control towers , we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide u...

Meditation: Homecoming to Our Life Breath - Perhaps the most universal place to collect and deepen attention is the breath.  This meditation begins with an intentional breath that calms the nervous system, and then opens to a clear, intimate presence with our natural breathing. With breath as our home base, we practice returning again and again when the mind becomes distracted. As presence grows,...

Refuge in the Wilderness - Part 1 - When we live from our mental control towers, we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and...

Meditation: Opening to Full Aliveness - This meditation includes relaxing and awakening through the body, widening the lens to include sound and then letting life live through us, receiving all that arises in open awareness.

The RAIN of Forgiveness - The capacity to release the armoring of hatred and blame is intrinsic to our evolving consciousness. This talk explores the process of authentic forgiveness, and how we can use the mindfulness-based tool of RAIN to heal and free our hearts.

Meditation: Vipassana – Practice of Seeing Clearly - 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 – and allowing the mind to settle. Then we open to whatever is predominant or calling our attention – se...

How to Stop the War Against Yourself - A conversation with Tara Brach & Dan Harris - It's possible to actually be addicted to self-criticism, especially as a way to keep yourself safe. But evidence shows that rather than safety, this pervasive habit in our society creates deep suffering. This conversation between Tara and Dan Harris dives into strategies to deal with your own self-hatred and culti...

Meditation: Opening to the River of Aliveness - This meditation guides us to awaken to sensation using the image of a smile and scanning through the body. We then open to sound and to the entire changing flow of experience. When we connect with the changing flow of sensations, feelings and sounds, we also discover the formless awareness that is our Source… and home.

Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness - The Power of Self-Nurturing - While we all need to customize meditation, this is particularly important for those living with PTSD or strong, potentially overwhelming emotions. This talk explores how trauma cuts us off from wholeness, and is accompanied by a deep and painful experience of shame. We look at the ways meditation can be adapted to cultivate sufficient sa...

Meditation: Relaxing into Presence or Sleep - This meditation can help us to access a relaxed attentiveness, or alternately, serve as a pathway to ease-filled sleep.

Meditation, Psychedelics, Mortality: A conversation with Tara and Roland Griffiths - Roland is a long-term meditator, a psychopharmacologist and professor at Johns Hopkins, and a leader in researching the clinical effects of psychedelics, including their impact on those struggling with cancer, depression or addiction. At the end of 2021, he discovered he had incurable stage 4 Colon Cancer. This co...

Meditation: The Silence That is Listening - Listening to sounds is a powerful way to quiet the thinking mind and connect with the natural openness of awareness. This meditation emphasizes the anchor of listening, and guides us to relax through our bodies and let sounds wash through us. In this receptivity we find a homecoming to full presence and peace.

Trusting the Gold - Realizing Our Basic Goodness - Can you imagine a world where humans are able to look at each other and all of life, and see the light of the sacred shining through? This talk explores our potential for trusting the love and awareness that animate our living world. We investigate the suffering of othering, how the trance of separateness blinds us to our basic goodness, and then...

Meditation: Relaxing with a Smile into Living Presence - This meditation guides us to awaken to sensation using the image of a smile and scanning through the body. We then open to sound and to the entire changing flow of experience. When we connect with the changing flow of sensations, feelings and sounds, we also discover the formless awareness that is our Source… and home. We end with a prayer t...

Tara shares a podcast from Dan Harris: The Dalai Lama's Guide to Happiness - Part 1 - Dan Harris (host of Ten Percent Happier) flies to Dharamsala, India to spend two weeks in the orbit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is the first installment of a five-part audio documentary series, something we've never done before now. Over the course of the episodes, we talk to His Holiness about practical...

Realizing Your Deepest Intention - The Buddha taught that this whole life – including our thoughts, feelings and actions – arise from the tip of intention. While our intentions are usually marbled with wanting and fear, when intention comes into the light of consciousness, it unfolds into its most pure essence. This talk explores ways that when we are stuck in reactivity, we can become aware of in...

Meditation: Awake Awareness is Our Home - This meditation guides us in awakening our awareness by opening to all our senses and recognizing the alert presence that is always, already here. By relaxing back into the presence over and over, we become familiar with the reality that is truly our home.

Freedom Beyond Selfing - We spend many moments in a trance of selfing - preoccupied with the stories, wants and fears of what feels to be a separate self. The suffering is that this self-fixation obscures the depth and mystery of our being. In this talk we explore how to relate wisely to selfing, and discover the light and love that express our true nature.

Meditation: Letting Go and Letting Be - 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. Let go of what is past Let go of what may come Let go of what is happening now Don't try to figure anything out Don't try to make anything happen Relax right now and...

IntraConnected – Part 2: Conversation with Tara and Dan Siegel - In this conversation, Tara interviews Dan about the themes in his new book, IntraConnected . They explore how our identity gets formed, and the profound healing and freedom that come with widening our sense of identity from me to what Dan terms "Mwe" (me plus we.)  The principles they touch on come from indigenous wisdom, the contemp...

Meditation: "Yes" to Our Moments - 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 energetic allowing of "Yes." We close with a poem by Danna Faulds, "White Dove."

IntraConnected – Part 1: Conversation with Tara and Dan Siegel - In this conversation, Tara interviews Dan about the themes in his new book, IntraConnected . They explore how our identity gets formed, and the profound healing and freedom that come with widening our sense of identity from me to what Dan terms "Mwe" (me plus we.)  The principles they touch on come from indigenous wisdom, the contemp...