Tara Brach

Facing Pandemic Fears with an Awake Heart (2020-03-18) - While it's natural to feel fear during times of great collective crisis, our challenge is that fear easily takes over our lives. This talk explores how the mindfulness and compassion of the RAIN meditation can help us find an inner refuge in the face of fear, and deepen our loving connection with each other.

Guided Meditation for Times of Pandemic: "Calling on Your Awakened Heart" (2020-03-18) - In the midst of difficulty we need access to our deepest wisdom and love. This guided meditation calls forth this loving presence by opening to the heart and spirit of whatever being in our life we most experience as calm, wise and compassionate (offered online via livestream). Your support enables us to conti...

Meditation: Bring RAIN to the Wanting Mind - (2020-03-04) -  We begin the meditation by briefly scanning through the body and sensing awareness of being here. We scan our life and use the acronym RAIN to Recognize a feeling of wanting, Allow it to be there, and Investigate how we're holding the experience in our body. As we trace back to our longing for belonging, we Nurture a feeling of belonging...

Guided Heart Meditation: Loving Kindness - Befriending our Lives - This meditation guides us in how to cultivate a deep quality of friendliness in relating to our inner life and each other. The gift of this practice is a direct sense of belonging - knowing that we can never be alone (a retreat meditation).

Desire and Addiction (Part 2): Voices of Longing Calling You Home (2020-03-11) - Desire is intrinsic to all living forms - the urge to exist and flourish. It turns to suffering when, due to unmet needs, it contracts, intensifies and separates us from our full aliveness and awareness. These two talks guide us in awakening from this trance, and discovering how within desire is the longing that can c...

Desire and Addiction: Voices of Longing Calling You Home (2020-03-04) - Desire is intrinsic to all living forms - the urge to exist and flourish. It turns to suffering when, due to unmet needs, it contracts, intensifies and separates us from our full aliveness and awareness. These two talks guide us in awakening from this trance, and discovering how within desire is the longing that can carry us t...

Meditation: The Blessings of Yes (2020-03-04) - When our hearts open to the life that is here, just as it is, we discover vast loving presence. This meditation engages the smile as we scan through and awaken to our body and senses. Then we practice meeting the changing flow of life with a full allowing, wakeful and open awareness. We close with a verse from e.e. cummings.

Facing Fear (Part 2) - Awakening Your Fearless Heart (2020-02-26) - Fear is a natural and universal part of our incarnation, and, when it goes on overdrive, we get imprisoned in the suffering of separation. These two talks explore how the RAIN meditation can help us face fear, and discover the boundless loving awareness that includes but is not contracted by currents of fear.

Meditation: Relaxing with Life (2020-02-26) - This meditation begins with a scan, and then we practice opening to and relaxing with our changing experience. The sitting closes with a beautiful poem by Danna Faulds - Just for Now . Join Tara's email community at http://eepurl.com/6YfI , to receive exclusive updates, events, and meditations. - Get a free download of Tara's 10 min meditation: "Mindfu...

Working with Trauma: Tara Interviews Jim Gordon, MD (2020-02-19) - Dr. Jim Gordon is author of the new book,  The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. In this interview with Tara, he talks about his work with populations around the globe struggling with trauma, and some of the most powerful practices that can be done on our own in healing trauma. Jim's organization is th...

Meditation: Letting Life Live Through You (2020-02-19) - We begin with a body scan, open to sounds and to listening to and feeling the moment. From spacious awareness the practice is simply to recognize and allow the changing flow of life. The meditation ends with the poem, "Hokusai Says," by Roger Keyes. Join Tara's email community at http://eepurl.com/6YfI , to receive exclusive updates, events,...

Facing Fear (Part 1) - Awakening Your Fearless Heart - Fear is a natural and universal part of our incarnation, and, when it goes on overdrive, we get imprisoned in the suffering of separation. These two talks explore how the RAIN meditation can help us face fear, and discover the boundless loving awareness that includes but is not contracted by currents of fear.

Meditation: Open-Hearted Presence (2020-02-12) - This meditation establishes a kind attention by bringing the imagery and felt sense of a smile into the body scan, and then with the breath as a home base, opens the attention to changing experience. We end with a brief loving kindness reflection.

Embodied Presence (Part 2) - Planting our Roots in the Universe - Working with Pain (2020-02-05) - In describing our human predicament and dis-ease, D.H. Lawrence says we are like a great tree with our roots in the air. We need to replant ourselves—in our bodies, hearts and spirit. These two talks are guides to replanting ourselves. In Part 1, we explore how we are so often dissociated from the li...

Meditation: A Listening Presence (2020-02-05) - The receptivity of listening awakens us to the living stream of life. This meditation guides us in listening to sounds, and then listening to and feeling the aliveness of our bodies and the movement of the breath. We close with a simple offering of lovingkindness to our inner life and our world.

Being Truthful - How Honesty Nourishes Love - The grounds of happiness, loving relationships and a just and flourishing society is honesty. And yet our current times are characterized by a plethora of deception – both societally, and often in more subtle ways, in our personal lives. This talk examines the deep conditioning we have to deceive others, and to avoid facing and acknowledging our own vu...

Guided Heart Meditation: Releasing Blame (retreat) (2019-12-30) - Our self-protective habits of resentment and blame block intimacy and connection with ourself and others. This short talk and meditation are an invitation to deepen our understanding of the suffering of blame, and to release the armoring to loving freely. (recorded at the IMCW 2019 New Year's 5-day Silent Retreat)

Part 1: Embodied Presence - Planting our Roots in the Universe (2020-01-22) - In describing our human predicament and dis-ease, D.H. Lawrence says we are like a great tree with our roots in the air. We need to replant ourselves—in our bodies, hearts and spirit. These two talks are guides to replanting ourselves. In Part 1, we explore how we are so often dissociated from the life of our body, and t...

Meditation: Portal to Sacred Presence - This meditation includes a full body scan, and then opens the senses to all experience, allowing life to be just as it is. Awakening to the life of our body reveals the mysterious formless presence that is our source. We close with a poem from Danna Faulds, Trusting Prana.

Shifting From Limbic to Liberating Intention (2020-01-15) - Becoming conscious of our intentions is the first step to truly aligning our life with our heart. This talk explores identifying when we are being driven by grasping and fear, and ways we can bring compassion to unmet needs and discover the deeper longing - the liberating intention - that guides us to freedom.

Meditation: Coming Home with the Breath - This guided practice has a short period of relaxing the body, and establishes the breath as a home base for attention. We practice arriving again and again, deepening the pathway of homecoming. The meditation ends with lovingkindness for ourselves and our world.

The Three Refuges - Gateways to Belonging and Freedom (2020-01-08) - We all need ways to guide our attention that allow us to find wisdom, love and freedom in the midst of our lives. This talk reviews three archetypal gateways—Buddha/awareness, Dharma/truth, and Sangha/loving community. Through teachings, guided meditations and a traditional refuge ritual, we engage together in bringing alive thes...

Meditation: Relaxed and Awake - This guided meditation helps us find ease and wakefulness in our body and mind. With the breath as our home base, we offer a gentle and full attention to the changing waves. We close with a beautiful poem, "Walk Slowly," by Danna Faulds. Join Tara's email community at http://eepurl.com/6YfI, to receive exclusive updates, events, and meditations. - Get a free downloa...

The Power of Awake Awareness (retreat talk) (2019-12-28) - We all encounter "demons" of fear, anger, hurt, craving and shame. This talk explores our key ways of resisting difficult emotions, and how "when the resistance is gone, the demons are gone." We look at the power of mindfulness and compassion to undo resistance, and open us to the loving presence that can handle whatever energies arise. Th...

Introductory Meditation Instructions - Guided Practice from Retreat - This guided session includes an overview of the primary components in meditation practices, and then guidance in awakening the senses, collecting the attention, and opening mindfully to changing experience.