Tara Brach

Meditation: Breathing Our Way to Peace & Freedom - This meditation guides us in collecting attention with an intentional long deep 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 inner freedom. (a favorite from the archives) "Little breath breathe me gently, row me, for I am the river I am le...

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 un...

Meditation: The Heartspace that is Home - This meditation awakens attention to the space of awareness… (a special from the archives). "No matter how far you've wandered, this heartspace – this awake tender awareness – is only a half-breath of remembrance away."

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 p...

Meditation: Awakening Our Energy Body - This meditation scans the body and directly invites the awakening of key energy centers (chakras) in our body. We then rest in the openhearted awareness that includes this ever changing creative flow of aliveness (a classic meditation from the archives).

Part 1: 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 p...

Meditation: Awake & Open Awareness - This calming meditation practice helps settle the mind with the breath and then opens to the changing flow of experience, letting life be just as it is.

Discovering the Power of Prayer (2018-08-15) - We all know the pain of separation and have a longing for connection. When we silently listen to and contact the depth of that longing, we are at the root of transformational prayer. This talk looks at what prayer is, who/what we are praying to, the shadow side of prayer, and ways of cultivating our prayers so that they become authentic vehicles for s...

Meditation: Presence and Breath (2018-08-15) - This simple meditation guides us to wake up awareness of the body, and rest with the movement of the breath. We are invited to discover the presence that arises as we come home to our moment-to-moment experience. The practice ends with a short prayer, connecting with what most matters to our heart.

Most people get depressed at times, and many suffer greatly from bouts of major depression. At the heart of the suffering is the experience of severed belonging—of being imprisoned in the pain of separation, unworthiness, unlovability and hopelessness. These two talks explore several meditation practices that reconnect us with our natural aliveness, openheartedness and awareness. They empower us t...

Meditation: Letting Go of Doing (2018-08-11) - Meditation becomes truly freeing in the moments when there is no controlling whatsoever; when nothing is resisted or grasped after. This guided meditation begins with a simple body scan, relaxing and awakening to sensations in the body and then including the play of sound. Then we let go of any doing, and simply notice and allow the changing flow of e...

Healing Depression with Meditation - Part 1 (2018-08-01) - Most people get depressed at times, and many suffer greatly from bouts of major depression. At the heart of the suffering is the experience of severed belonging—of being imprisoned in the pain of separation, unworthiness, unlovability and hopelessness. These two talks explore several meditation practices that reconnect us with our natural...

Meditation: Refuge in Living Presence (2018-08-01) - We spend great swaths of time in a trance that removes us from awareness of our body and senses. This meditation reconnects us by scanning through the body, including sounds and then resting in the field of awareness and aliveness. We practice relaxing and gently arriving again when thoughts carry us away; learning the pathway home to living pre...

Saying "Yes" - Meeting Your Edge and Softening (2018-07-25) - Our habitual ways of avoiding unpleasant experience keep us from intimacy with our inner life and with each other. This talk helps us recognize these often unconscious patterns that keep us identified with a separate, threatened self, and offers guidance in saying "yes" to the life we encounter. As we release resistance, we discover the...

Meditation: Saying Yes to Life (2018-07-25) - We are conditioned to scan for "what's wrong" and contract our body and mind in anticipation of danger. This meditation helps us undo these primal survival habits, and frees us to inhabit the full aliveness, creativity and love our natural being.

What Is It Like Being You? (2018-07-18) - Compassion is hard wired in our organism, and can be cultivated. This talk helps us identify the blocks to compassion—our outmoded survival equipment—and using RAIN, offers practical guidance in mindfully attuning to others' emotional experience and awakening our natural tenderness and care. This talk includes a short introduction to the meditation: The RA...

This meditation invites relaxation and ease. We begin with a long deep breathing that helps calm the body and mind. Then we release tensions that might be held in the body, and settle our attention in a receptive way with the breath. The intention is to discover the relaxed wakefulness that expresses our natural being. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely...

From Human Doing to Human Being (2018-07-11) - Like Sisyphus eternally pushing the boulder up the hill, we can spend many moments busily trying to manage our life. This two-part talk explores how we can awaken from our non-stop doing, including the incessant inner narrative, and discover the mystery, love and freedom that arises in Being. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks an...

Meditation: Natural, Open Awareness (2018-07-11) - When we are stressed, our attention narrows and fixates, often into obsessive thinking, worry and judgment. This meditation relaxes and opens the mind, first by a body scan and a "smile down," and then by including all changing experience in a spacious awareness. As our attention shifts from mind objects like sensation and sound to the space of aw...

Skeleton Woman: Embracing This Living and Dying World - (A favorite from the archives) Based on a wonderful myth told by Clarissa Estes, this talk looks at the way we run from "lady death" and the blessings of opening our arms and heart. If we can embrace the whole of our nature with unconditional presence – including the inevitability of change and loss–we discover deep wisdom and enduring love....

Meditation: 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 to feel loved, and call on loving presence to bless us. By imagining and allowing ourselves to receive love, our heart...

Evolving Beyond "Unreal Othering" (2018-06-27) - What motivates us - as individuals and as a society - to build walls and knowingly hurt others? This talk explores the evolutionary roots of "unreal othering" and how when we are hijacked by fear, it can take over and disconnect us from the very real suffering of others. We then look at how meditative strategies awaken us from othering, and reveal o...

Meditation: Opening to the Waves (2018-06-27) - When we are lost in thought, we lose touch with the aliveness and awareness that is always here. This meditation guides us with a mindful body scan to open to our senses, then to sound and all waves of aliveness. From that open presence we end with a loving kindness prayer.

Landlocked in Fur – Three Domains of Formless Presence (Retreat Talk) - While we have evolved to experience a defining sense of separate self, our potential is to awaken to the formless dimension – the pure awareness is our shared source. This talk explores how we can undo the identification with thoughts, emotions and feelings that keeps us landlocked and unable to trust and live from our natural...

Meditation: The Silence That's Listening (from retreat) - Listening to sounds is a powerful way to quiet the thinking mind and connect with the natural openness of awareness. In this guided meditation, we begin by opening to sound and then listening to and feeling the whole changing flow of life - allowing whatever is here to be just as it is. In the foreground, we notice the dance of sensations,...