2022-07-20 - Homecoming to Your True Nature: Awakening beyond the separate, fearful self - Most of us unconsciously identify as a separate, threatened, deficient self. This talk shines a light on this conditioning and explores the ways that mindfulness, compassion and self-inquiry reveal the freedom of our true nature.

Tara Brach

2022-07-20 - Homecoming to Your True Nature

Meditation: The Breath – Portal to Presence - The meditation begins with breathing mindfully to collect and calm the body and mind. Then the attention opens to include the changing flow in a spacious natural presence.

Meditation: The Breath – Portal to Presence

From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence - The trance of unworthiness is sustained by our aversion to the dragons – the difficult emotions and related behaviors that are a deeply conditioned part of the human experience. In this talk we explore the awakening that is possible as we recognize our reactive patterns and instead of judgment, offer a loving and healing presence (a favorite from the archives).

From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence

Meditation: Resting in Wakeful Presence - This meditation scans through the body - arriving in the foreground with sounds, feelings and sensations, like the surface waves of the sea coming and going. And in the background, experiencing an alert inner stillness – a vast presence from which all activity pours forth.

Meditation: Resting in Wakeful Presence

Navigating the Dark Ages - How do we process and respond to increasing societal oppression and violence? What helps us transform the energies of fear, hatred and delusion? This talk offers ways we can draw on our spiritual path to steady our heart and engage with presence, wisdom and care.

Navigating the Dark Ages

Meditation: Cultivating a Gentle, Kind Attention - This meditation calls on the image and felt sense of a smile as we scan through the body, and invites a receptive and caring presence, as we open our attention to the changing flow of life.

Meditation: Cultivating a Gentle, Kind Attention

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2 - Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will become passive or condone injustice) and the practices that create the grounds for surrender, emotional healing, transformational activism and spiritual freedom.

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 2

Meditation: Letting Go - One way of understanding meditation is a letting go of the habitual clenching of thoughts, the clenching that resists emotions and pulls away from aliveness itself. This meditation guides us in letting go, first through the body, and then practicing letting go of thoughts and relaxing and resting in the changing flow of experience. The blessing of letting go is a homecoming into the truth and wholeness of what we are, a realization of reality, and freedom. 

Meditation: Letting Go

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1 - Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will become passive or condone injustice) and the practices that create the grounds for surrender, emotional healing, transformational activism and spiritual freedom.

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1

Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life (16:11 min.) - 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 gift is a homecoming to our naturally loving presence.

Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life (16:11 min.)

The Three Steps of Letting Go - A wonderful inquiry is, “What is between me and openhearted presence?” This talk explores the profound healing and transformation that arises when we release the blocks to our natural and loving awareness.

The Three Steps of Letting Go

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Open Wakefulness - This meditation begins by relaxing through the body and connecting with inner aliveness and space. We then include sounds and sense the openness to life. At the center of the practice is a relaxing back and inhabiting spacious awareness. The meditation ends as we experience the heart from the vantage of spacious awareness and offer prayers to our inner life and all life.

Meditation: Relaxing Back into Open Wakefulness

Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 2 - In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding—to ourselves, each other and our world– with courageous, wise hearts.

Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 2

Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence - Our thoughts keep us removed from this living world. This guided practice invites us to open and relax with the moment to moment experience of our senses. It includes a poem by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, “Wherever you are, Find a Trail.”

Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence

Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 1 - In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding – to ourselves, each other and our world – with courageous, wise hearts.  

Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 1

Tara Brach, Ph.D is an internationally known meditation teacher and author of bestselling Radical Acceptance and True Refuge. Tara shares a weekly guided meditation and talk that blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices. The podcast addresses the value of mindfulness meditation and self-compassion in relieving emotional suffering, serving spiritual awakening and bringing healing to our world.

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Tara Brach

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