Tara Brach

Happy for No Reason - Part 2 (2016-05-25) - These two talks explore the two different kinds of happiness, the blocks to happiness, and the ways that mindful presence and intentional gladdening the heart (positive neuroplasticity) can open us to our full potential for true happiness. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offerin...

Meditation: Living Presence with Body Scan (2016-05-25) - A key pathway to full presence is awakening through the body. This meditation guides us through a body scan, relaxing and receiving the play of sensations. We then deepen attention to the breath, and rest with the rhythmic waves of breathing, experiencing the background of the whole domain of physical aliveness.

Happy for No Reason - Part 1 (2016-05-18) - These two talks explore the two different kinds of happiness, the blocks to happiness, and the ways that mindful presence and intentional gladdening the heart (positive neuroplasticity) can open us to our full potential for true happiness. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offerin...

Meditation: Letting Life Live through You (2016-05-18) - This meditation awakens the senses and then guides us into the wakeful openness that includes the whole play of sensations, feelings and sound. We become fully awake and alive as we open to the awareness that allows life to live through us. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will co...

Conscious Prayer: Finding Refuge in Loving Presence (Retreat talk) (2016-05-11) - 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. (from the 2016 IMCW Spring Retreat) Your support enables us to continue to offer these talk...

Meditation: Basic Body and Breath Scan - (2016-05-07) - from the first morning of the IMCW 2016 Spring weeklong retreat, Tara offers a short introductory meditation with a body scan, bringing focus to the breath, sounds, then resting in awareness. Free download of Tara's 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease" when you join her email list .

RAIN of Forgiveness (2015-05-05) - 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. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a don...

Meditation: Collecting and Quieting the Mind (2016-05-04) - Our conditioned mind is filled with distractions, including worry-thoughts that continually create anxiety in the body. This meditation guides us in relaxing the body, and then establishing the breath as a home base. By gathering and collecting the attention, the mind can settle and allow for a relaxed, wakeful presence. Free download of...

Meditation: Spacious Clear Awareness (2016-04-20) (23 min) - This meditation begins with a breath that calms and collects the attention, and then a body scan that enables us to awaken our senses. Finally, we relax open fully to include the changing flow of sounds and sensations, in a spacious, clear awareness.  

Listening with an Awake Heart (2016-04-27) - True listening both nurtures and expresses evolving consciousness. This talk explores our ego-based conditioning to have an agenda or defendedness that prevents deep listening, and the strategies that evolve our capacity to listen fully to ourselves and others. When our listening is openhearted and full, it enables deep understanding and connectedness,...

Meditation: Awareness - Listening To and Feeling the Moment (2016-04-27) - This meditation awakens a relaxed open presence through the body. We then widen attention to include sounds, and then relax back and fully inhabit the awareness that is listening to and feeling the changing flow of life. Free download of Tara's new 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease" when you join...

Love is Always Loving Us (2016-04-20) - This talk draws on Christian mystic Henri Nouwen’s book Return of the Prodigal Son . We explore the primary ways we leave home - leave presence, connection, beingness - and the pathways of deep attention and love that enable our return. The emphasis is on “letting in love” as a key and often missing element in practices that heal and free our hearts. Through...

Meditation: Spacious Clear Awareness (2016-04-20) - This meditation begins with a breath that calms and collects the attention, and then a body scan that enables us to awaken our senses. Finally, we relax open fully to include the changing flow of sounds and sensations, in a spacious, clear awareness. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you wi...

Releasing Self-Blame - Pathways to a Forgiving Heart When we are stuck in blaming, disliking or hating ourselves, we are unable to love our world. This talk explores what underlies our addiction to self-blame and the teachings and practices that loosen aversive self-judgment and help us cultivate a forgiving heart.

Meditation: Vipassana - Practice of Seeing Clearly (2016-04-13) 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 att...

Healing Self-Doubt (2013-10-30) - Siddhartha Gautama’s last challenge before enlightenment was doubt, and to some degree, most of us live with limiting beliefs about our own worthiness and goodness. This talk looks at the tenacity of self-doubt and the power of mindfulness, investigation and compassion in releasing its grip.

Meditation: Awakening an Intimate Presence (2016-04-06) - This guided meditation cultivates a relaxed, gentle presence with whatever expressions of life are arising in the moment. We begin by releasing and opening through the body, and then include all sensations, feelings and sounds in an intimate, allowing presence.

Embodied Awareness - Pain and Living Fully - Part 3 (2016-03-30) - The experiences we most value - feeling creative, loving, vital - require being awake in our bodies. Yet when faced with physical pain, our conditioning is to pull away from our bodies, and get lost in thoughts. This talk offers guidance in working mindfully with different levels of pain, as we cultivate our capacity to live from a...

Meditation: The Pathway of Deep Listening (2016-03-30) - Listening is an ideal template for awareness itself - it is naturally receptive, open and awake. This meditation invites a deep listening to and feeling our lives, and opens us to the realization of the flow of changing experience and the background awareness that is the source of our Being. Your support enables us to continue to offer these...

Reflection: RAIN - A Guide for Embodied Presence (from 2013-03-23) - We have deep conditioning to disconnect from our body’s awareness and, in so doing, leave the site of our creativity, love and vitality. This short meditation uses the acronym RAIN as a guide in re-inhabiting our bodies and our full aliveness.   Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and E...

Short Reflection: This Living Body - Our Portal to Freedom (2016-03-23) (12:15 min) - Our habit is to leave home - the aliveness of our body - and seek happiness through avoiding unpleasantness and chasing after pleasure. This short talk and reflection point to embodied presence as the gateway to genuine openheartedness and freedom. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely....

Embodied Awareness - Embracing the Unlived Life - Part 2 (2016-03-23) - When we disconnect from the aliveness of our body, we are in a trance that prevents us from living and loving fully. These two talks examine our habits of dissociation - including the cutting off that comes from trauma - and the suffering of “unlived life” that this creates. We then look at how practices of mindfulness and com...

Meditation: Living Presence (2016-03-23) (20:01 min) - The pathway to experiencing full aliveness and openheartedness is by awakening awareness throughout the body. This meditation begins by establishing a rhythmic inflow and outflow of the breath, in order to calm and collect the mind. Then continuing with the conscious breathing, we are guided through the body - bringing attention to sensations...

Guided Reflection: Awakening through Conflict (from a talk given on 2014-04-23) - (13 min) “We live in a field where our emotions are an open loop – we affect each other. When we’re with someone who’s blaming, we tighten. Anger makes us tighten. When we’re with someone who’s open and caring, we become more open. It’s very, very powerful what’s possible when we put down the blame and we connect wit...

Practical Dharma for Stressful Times (2016-03-16) - When we are caught in a stress reaction, we are in a trance that cuts us off from our creativity, full intelligence and capacity to be loving. This talk explores the flags of the stress-trance and three meditative strategies for shifting from fight/flight to attend/befriend. (at end is “Love the One You’re With” by Steven Stills) Tara was traveli...