Tara Brach

Meditation: Meeting Anger with Awareness (2020-06-10) - When anger is held in mindfulness, it can energize us to respond wisely to challenging situations. This meditation guides us in meeting personal or societal anger with RAIN - recognize, allow, investigate and nurture. [NOTE: this meditation was given at the end of Tara’s "Anger and Transformation" talk on 2020-06-10.]

Anger and Transformation (2020-06-19) - The purpose of anger is to let us know there’s an obstacle to our wellbeing, and to energize us to act. While natural and necessary for survival and thriving, this powerful energy often possesses us and leads to suffering. This talk explores how we can use the RAIN meditation in our personal and societal life, to meet anger with a mindful, compassionate presence. Freed from the identification with a limited, separate reactive self, we can listen to the message of anger, draw on the purity of its energy, and respond from our natural intelligence, creativity and care.

Meditation: Inner Refuge of Calm (2020-06-10) - In times of great stress, it’s crucial that we have pathways to quiet our minds, relax our bodies and rest in a calm, steady presence. This meditation guides us in using the breath, body scan and a home base of presence to find that inner refuge that can carry us through difficult times.

A Courageous Presence with Racism (2020-06-03) - Anti-Black racism is the core wound of American culture, and we each have a role to play in fighting racism, a medicine to bring to these times. This talk explores how we can offer an honest and courageous presence to key domains of this suffering. We then look at affirming that Black lives truly matter with our dedicated and wise action. 

Meditation: Homecoming to Wakeful Presence (2020-06-03) - This meditation begins with us standing in mindful movement, guiding us in awakening awareness in the body. Then in sitting practice, we open all our senses, resting in the wakeful presence that can include the changing waves of our life.

Remembering Goodness: Three Gestures of Love - Tara offers this favorite talk from the archives. It explores the power of forgiveness, love and gratitude in re-connecting to our light and awareness, and being able to see the sacredness that shines through everyone. Within times of crisis practicing these gestures of love can truly feel like a pathway home. This talk explores a simple yet powerful way of arousing loving presence and dissolving the narrow identification that keeps us from inhabiting our awakened heartmind.

Meditation: Spacious, Loving Awareness (from retreat) - When our awareness is awake and open, we naturally respond to this changing life with warmth, tenderness and love. This practice helps us discover the spaciousness of awareness by realizing the space and aliveness that is in the body, and then sensing the continuous space that holds all life. We then sense how this continuous space is filled with the light of awareness and pervaded by love. Includes a short talk that contexts the meditation. 

Meditation: Light RAIN in Difficult Times (2020-05-23) - This meditation guides us in bringing the mindfulness and self-compassion of RAIN to a challenging part of our life, and particularly, to places of self-judgment or feelings of failure.

Embracing Uncertainty: Sheltering in Love - Part 9 (2020-05-20) -  How we tolerate uncertainty - during current times and throughout our lives - has a powerful effect on our capacity for presence, aliveness and love. This talk explores the conditioned ways of reacting to insecurity that contract us, and pathways of letting go of resistance, opening to Beginner's mind and discovering a timeless, wise and loving presence in the midst of inevitable change. 

Meditation: The Art of Letting Go (2020-05-20) - Letting go means releasing the resistance we have to experiencing the present moment. This meditation guides us to let go of the thoughts that block our immediate sensory experience, the tension in the body that reduces aliveness and the armoring around the heart that dulls our sensitivity and tenderness toward life itself.

Meditation: Calling on Your Future Self (2020-05-09) - We have within us the wisdom and compassion that can carry us through the most challenging times. This meditation guides us in accessing these inner resources by calling on the most evolved part of our being.

Sheltering in Love – Part 8: Finding Freedom in the Midst of Failure (2020-05-13) - Everyone faces personal failure, and it’s an extremely raw and painful feeling. If we have the courage to stay with the feelings, failure can become a portal to the realization of who we are beyond the imperfect separate self. This talk calls on Samuel Beckett’s wonderful quote (referenced by Pema Chödron), “Fail, Fail again, Fail better,” and offers guidance on finding freedom as we move through some of our most difficult moments.

Meditation: Living, Embodied Presence (2020-05-13) - This practice begins with a full body scan and then guides us to return again and again to our senses. What we find is a dynamic presence, a Hereness that feels like home. The meditation ends with a beautiful poem by David Wagoner called, “Lost.”

Sheltering in Love – Part 7: Awakening from the Prison of Blame (2020-05-06) - A key way stress disconnects us from ourselves and each other is through the limbic reactivity of blame. This talk helps us to recognize the suffering of chronic blame, resentment and anger, and to bring a healing presence to the vulnerability that underlies blame.

Meditation: Openhearted Presence (2020-05-06) - This meditation guides us in embodying loving presence through a body scan, and then meeting whatever arises with a tender heart. We close with a beautiful blessing-poem from John O’Donahue

Sheltering In Love - Part 6: Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence - Part 2 of 2 (2020-04-29) - The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. These two talks look at the epidemic of loneliness predating the pandemic, and how loneliness is exacerbated in our current global crisis for those living alone, and for those feeling disconnected to themselves and others. We then explore how a courageous practice of compassionate presence - with our inner life, and in relationships - can turn the energy of loneliness into a current of healing and freedom.

Meditation: Vipassana - Seeing Life As It Is (2020-04-29) - This classic Buddhist meditation trains us to wake up out of thoughts and to attend to our changing experience with a balanced, clear and open presence.

Meditation: Awakening Through the Animal-Headed Deities (2020-04-15) - This short meditation guides us in engaging with challenging emotions with presence and compassion. By opening to the “deities” we discover an open heartspace that can hold and respond to our hurting world (from the closing meditation of "Sheltering in Love - Part 4").

Sheltering in Love (Part 5): Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence (2020-04-22) - The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. These next two talks look at the epidemic of loneliness pre-dating the pandemic, and how loneliness is exacerbated in our current global crisis for those living alone, and for those feeling disconnected to themselves and others. We then explore how a courageous practice of compassionate presence - with our inner life, and in relationships - can turn the energy of loneliness into a current of healing and freedom.

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Natural Awareness (2020-04-22) - In this meditation we are guided to discover the space and aliveness that fills the body, sense the space in the universe, and then to realize our Beingness as continuous space, filled with the light of awareness. When our attention contracts into thoughts, the pathway to awareness is a relaxing back, reopening to the natural openness, silence and stillness of our true nature.