Tara Brach
1,359 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago - ★★★★★ - 9.3K ratingsTara 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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Episodes
2024-04-03 - Relating Wisely to our Inner Life: Tara and Lee C Camp
April 04, 2024 19:33 - 1 hour - 45.8 MBIn this conversation, recorded for the acclaimed podcast, No Small Endeavor, award winning theologian Lee C. Camp interviews Tara about radically accepting and loving our being, just as we are. The conversation includes an unpacking of the RAIN meditation, and stories of navigating difficulty from Tara’s life. No Small Endeavor, produced by Great Feeling Studios and PRX, brings you thoughtful conversations with artists, theologians and philosophers about what it means to live a good life. ...
Meditation: A Present Heart
April 04, 2024 00:00 - 16 minutes - 11.4 MBOne translation of mindfulness, in Chinese, is “present heart.” In this guided meditation we begin by awakening through the body and the senses, and then open the attention to the changing flow of experience. The intention is to meet whatever arises with a wakeful and kind presence. It's so helpful to say, "What's happening inside me right now?" Then, “Can I meet this with kindness, with a present heart?"
An Invitation to Freedom: A conversation between Tara and Connirae Andreas
March 28, 2024 17:15 - 1 hour - 52.5 MBConnirae Andreas was one of the first trainers in neurolinguistic programming (NLP), developed and wrote a book on the Core Transformation Process, and more recently, the Wholeness Process. Her new book, The Wholeness Work Essential Guide: Level I—Healing and Awakening is the focus of our conversation. Connirae’s teachings and practices are deep and impactful. She is gifted in communicating and guiding our inner unfolding in a way that makes accessible the domains of deep awakening and fre...
Meditation: Widening Rings of Being
March 28, 2024 00:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MBIf we can recognize thoughts as thoughts, it becomes possible to open from virtual to living reality. This meditation guides us in awakening the senses and discovering the freedom, the awake space of Being, that is beyond the confines of thoughts.
2024-03-20 - Do you feel Overwhelmed? Turning Stress into a Gateway of Awakening
March 21, 2024 18:44 - 42 minutes - 29.1 MBStress and overwhelm are spiking around the globe. This talk explores how we can practice with the arising of stress in ways that calm our body and tap our capacity for full presence, wisdom and love.
Meditation: Openhearted Presence
March 21, 2024 00:00 - 21 minutes - 15 MBThis meditation guides us in embodying loving presence through a body scan, and then meeting whatever arises with a tender heart. “Resting in the awareness that includes this changing life, regarding the changing waves with care, moment-to-moment. The moments of waking up out of thought are actually profoundly transformational. If you notice thinking and then plant the seeds of kindness, that becomes the habit of the heart.” ~Tara We close with a beautiful blessing-poem from John O’Donoh...
Navigating the Dark Ages
March 14, 2024 18:11 - 46 minutes - 31.6 MBHow 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.
Meditation: Cultivating a Gentle, Kind Attention
March 14, 2024 00:00 - 19 minutes - 13.4 MBThis 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. "Our freedom comes not from what is happening, but from how we are relating to it. See if you can relate with the spirit of yes, allowing whatever arises to be here. And if it feels difficult, painful, then bringing some real kindness, a 'yes' with gentleness and kindness."
Part 2: Healing Depression with Meditation
March 07, 2024 18:55 - 55 minutes - 38.4 MBMost 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 to develop our inner resources, energize us to awaken, free us from rumination and remind us th...
Meditation: Letting Go of Doing
March 07, 2024 01:00 - 21 minutes - 14.6 MBMeditation 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. We then let go of any doing, and simply notice and allow the changing flow of experience, letting life be just as it is. In this pure allowing presence we become aware of the background silence that is listening. The inv...
Part 1: Healing Depression with Meditation
February 29, 2024 22:18 - 1 hour - 43.7 MBMost 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 to develop our inner resources, energize us to awaken, free us from rumination and remind us th...
Meditation: Refuge in Living Presence
February 29, 2024 01:00 - 22 minutes - 15.3 MBWe 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 presence.
“Getting Over Yourself”: A conversation with Tara Brach and Stephen Josephs
February 22, 2024 18:12 - 1 hour - 44.5 MBExecutive coach and author Stephen Josephs has worked with many top business leaders, guiding them in transcending the egoic conditioning that limit their impact on other people, and on societal change. In this conversation we look at what he’s learned about inner freedom and awakening from his own trauma, from 60 years of spiritual practice, from models of adult development, and from the poetry of Lao Tzu. Stephen and Tara have been close friends for over 50 years, and she considers him her...
Meditation: A Welcoming Heartspace
February 22, 2024 01:00 - 18 minutes - 12.4 MBOur pathway to peace and happiness is through opening, with tenderness, to our moment-to-moment experience. This meditation guides us first to be awake in our body and senses, and then to include the changing flow of life in a spacious, kind heart. We close with a short verse from poet Dorothy Hunt - Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment.
Letting Go of Controlling – Part 2: The Path of Freedom
February 15, 2024 19:45 - 1 hour - 41.5 MBWhile it’s natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence. This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart. We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening from exclusive identification with a separate ego/self; wh...
Guided Meditation: The Center of Now
February 15, 2024 01:00 - 15 minutes - 10.7 MBThis meditation awakens our senses, then guides us to rest in the changing flow of experience. When the mind drifts, we are invited to relax back into full living presence, into that Beingness that is the center of now. “Listening to and feeling, the changing flow - right here, right in the center of now.”
What is the Path to Peace? A conversation with Tara Brach and Assaf Katz
February 08, 2024 19:11 - 1 hour - 42.4 MBWhat is the Path to Peace? A conversation with Tara Brach and Assaf Katz - Assaf Katz is an activist and Buddhist teacher in Israel who opposes the Israeli governments’ devastating military action and long occupation in Palestine, and is dedicated to finding a path to peace. This conversation was part of an event for the Tovana mediation community in Israel. We talk about the inner process behind my circulation of a short piece responding to the violence in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel; ho...
Meditation: Relaxed and Alert
February 07, 2024 13:00 - 19 minutes - 13.5 MBThis meditation begins with a period of relaxing and collecting our attention with intentional long, deep breathing. We then deepen embodied presence, and widen to the awareness that includes sounds, sensations, feelings, breath, and all experience. When the mind drifts from this open, awake awareness, we gently return, re-relaxing and resting in an easeful, alert presence. Recorded at Tara’s Wednesday night class, the meditation ends with a sense of melting into community – relaxed and alert.
Letting Go of Controlling – Part 1: The Path of Freedom
February 01, 2024 20:16 - 56 minutes - 38.6 MBLetting Go of Controlling – Part 1: The Path of Freedom - While it’s natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence. This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart. We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening...
Meditation: Letting Go… Letting Be
February 01, 2024 01:00 - 16 minutes - 11.5 MBMeditation: Letting Go… Letting Be - This guided meditation invites us to imagine a clenched fist relaxing open, and explores this in releasing contractions in the body as well as the grip of thoughts. When we deeply let go and let be, our energy flows freely. We reconnect with our natural aliveness, love and awareness.
Changing Unhealthy Habits of Eating - A Conversation between Tara and Judson Brewer
January 25, 2024 22:23 - 1 hour - 57.3 MBChanging Unhealthy Habits of Eating - A Conversation between Tara and Judson Brewer - Countless people live with shame and distress about their eating. Dr. Judson Brewer, scientist, professor and author of “The Hunger Habit” (https://drjud.com/the-hunger-habit/) and many other groundbreaking books, is a thought leader in the field of habit change. He’s also a decades long practitioner of mindfulness, and a dear colleague and friend. In this conversation we explore how combining mindfulness ...
Meditation: Listening to our Heart
January 25, 2024 01:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MBMeditation: Listening to our Heart - True listening arouses an open receptive presence that can be truly healing. This meditation awakens a listening presence; first bringing that receptive awareness to sensations and sounds, and then offering that presence to the tenderness and vulnerability of our heart.
How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2
January 18, 2024 18:43 - 54 minutes - 37.3 MBHow Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2 - The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk, we explore the importance of hope on the spiritual path, its shadow side, and how we can nourish hope through these three elements in a way that serves inner freedom and the healing of our world. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundre...
Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness
January 17, 2024 23:58 - 20 minutes - 13.7 MBMeditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness - This meditation awakens a receptive attention to the senses, starting with physical sensations and opening to sound. Then we sense how open awake awareness is receiving the moment-to-moment arising and passing life. In the final part of the practice, we explore how awake awareness is receiving the experience of our heart and offer blessings to our inner life and all living beings.
How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1
January 11, 2024 21:45 - 45 minutes - 31.5 MBHow Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1 - The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk, we explore the importance of hope on the spiritual path, its shadow side, and how we can nourish hope through these three elements in a way that serves inner freedom and the healing of our world (a 2-part special favorite from the archives).
Meditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness
January 11, 2024 01:00 - 20 minutes - 14 MBMeditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness - We cut off from our aliveness when we are lost in thoughts and on auto pilot. This meditation arouses a receptivity to sensation from “the inside out,” opens the awareness to sound, and then invites a full resting in receptive, dynamic presence (from the archives). It doesn’t matter how many times the mind drifts. It’s the gentle re-arriving that retrains your heart and mind. Just to choose to come back… Perhaps to sense what might let go a li...
Coming Home to True Refuge
January 04, 2024 17:35 - 59 minutes - 40.9 MBComing Home to True Refuge - While we habitually try to control our life, our true refuge—the source of peace, safety and freedom—is in the direct realization of reality itself. This talk explores three archetypal portals to true refuge—awareness (buddha), truth (dharma) and love (sangha.) With each we practice short reflections that help bring the particular gateway to refuge alive.
Meditation: Energy and Source
January 04, 2024 01:00 - 19 minutes - 13.2 MBMeditation: Energy and Source - Our incessant thinking removes us from the full aliveness, vastness and mystery of Being. This guided practice helps us inhabit our energetic forms, and rest in the vast, formless stillness that gives rise to this ever-creative living world.
The Sacred Pause
December 29, 2023 00:38 - 54 minutes - 37.7 MBThe Sacred Pause - When we are lost in the trance of doing, our lives are on automatic, and contracted by sense that something’s wrong or missing. This talk explores the challenges of learning to pause, and the blessings that arise when we step out of our incessant mental and physical activity and reconnect with the being-qualities of presence, wisdom and love (a favorite from the archives). “The deepest expression of love is this non-doing presence because that’s when we are inhabiting wh...
Meditation: Opening to the Mystery
December 28, 2023 01:00 - 16 minutes - 11.5 MBMeditation: Opening to the Mystery - This guided meditation includes a body scan and invites the receptivity and letting-go of whole body breathing. Once we have awakened the vitality and presence throughout the body, we have access to the formless dimension, the awareness that is our source. The meditation closes with “Walk Slowly”, from the poetry of Danna Faulds.
Finding True Belonging in the Midst of Stress
December 21, 2023 22:42 - 53 minutes - 36.8 MBFinding True Belonging in the Midst of Stress - Our deepest longing is to feel our belonging to each other and all life. This reflection examines the primary forces that keep us trapped in a trance of separation. We then explore two powerful dimensions of spiritual practice that can undo trance and reveal the sentience and love that is our shared essence.
Meditation: Relaxed and Awake
December 21, 2023 01:00 - 16 minutes - 11.7 MBMeditation: 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.
Awakening from Trance – Embracing Unlived Life
December 14, 2023 22:28 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MBAwakening from Trance – Embracing Unlived Life - When physical or emotional pain is too much, our conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings. The result is a trance – we are split off from the wholeness of our aliveness, intelligence and capacity to love. This talk explores how this dissociation shows up in our lives and how mindfulness enables us to integrate cut-off parts of our being in a powerful way, and awaken from this trance.
Meditation: Opening to the Sea of Presence
December 14, 2023 01:00 - 20 minutes - 13.8 MBMeditation: Opening to the Sea of Presence - When our body and mind is relaxed, we become filled with a very awake, dynamic quality of presence. This meditation guides us in relaxing, opening our senses and resting in the vastness and inherent freedom of our own natural awareness.
Basic Goodness and Awe: A conversation between Tara Brach and Dacher Keltner
December 07, 2023 23:45 - 1 hour - 41.6 MBBasic Goodness and Awe: A conversation between Tara Brach and Dacher Keltner - Our conversation covers the biological, evolutionary and cultural bases of human goodness and the centrality of awe in the human experience. We explore the blocks to experiencing our full potential, and ways we can cultivate our innate capacity for finding wonder, love, creativity and beauty in our daily lives. Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a scien...
Guided Meditation: Whole Body Breathing
December 07, 2023 01:00 - 17 minutes - 11.9 MBGuided Meditation: Whole Body Breathing - This guided meditation includes a body scan and invites the receptivity and letting-go of whole body breathing. Once we have awakened the vitality and presence throughout the body, we have access to the formless dimension, the awareness that is our source.
How Do We Bridge the Divides?
November 30, 2023 20:58 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MBHow Do We Bridge the Divides? - The divides in our world can only exist if we humans are divided from our own full being and habituated to divides with others. In this reflection we explore bridging inner and relational divides as the grounds for evolving consciousness in our species and awakening to more connectedness and love in our world.
Meditation: Breathing Our Way to Peace & Freedom
November 30, 2023 01:00 - 19 minutes - 13.1 MBMeditation: 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. “Little breath breathe me gently, row me, for I am the river I am learning to cross.” – W.S. Merwin
A Generous Heart
November 23, 2023 23:07 - 55 minutes - 37.9 MBA Generous Heart - Our deep potential is to live from an awake, loving heart. This talk looks at how, with a kind and mindful attention, we can decondition habitual tendencies toward grasping and self-centeredness, and nourish the sense of connectedness and care that gives rise to generosity. As we bring these heart practices alive in our most immediate relationships, they have the power to evolve consciousness in widening circles across the world.
Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness
November 23, 2023 01:00 - 19 minutes - 13.7 MBMeditation: The Space of Loving Awareness - This meditation begins by guiding us through a scan: opening to inner space and aliveness, then to outer space, and then continuous space, filled with the light of awareness. We explore how every experience belongs to this infinite awake space of our Being, and can be held with tenderness and love.
Conversation with Tara Brach and Arthur Brooks: Becoming Happier
November 16, 2023 21:45 - 1 hour - 54.2 MBBecoming Happier: Conversation with Tara Brach and Arthur Brooks - The Dalai Lama regularly says that everyone wants to be happy, nobody wants to suffer. Arthur Brooks, in his new book on getting happier (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey) digs into the practical and science-based approaches that increase deep well-being. In this conversation Tara and Arthur discuss the ingredients of happiness, the role of unhappiness in our lives, how to work with core ego-fears, the power of metacognition, t...
Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence
November 16, 2023 01:09 - 13 minutes - 9.05 MBMeditation: 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.”
The Wise Heart of Radical Acceptance
November 09, 2023 21:33 - 1 hour - 47 MBThe Wise Heart of Radical Acceptance - When we are caught in self-judgment, we forget the truth of who we are – our wholeness, awareness and love. This talk examines how we take the imperfect waves of our being personally, and become imprisoned in the trance of unworthiness, a limited and distorted reality. We then look at how the practice of Radical Acceptance enables us to come home to a fullness of being, and live from a growing sense of loving connectedness with all beings.
Meditation: Relaxing Back and Saying Yes to the Moment
November 09, 2023 00:40 - 18 minutes - 8.62 MBMeditation: Relaxing Back and Saying Yes to the Moment - When we are stressed, our conditioning is to tighten our body. We tense against our moment-to-moment experience. This meditation is a powerful practice of de-conditioning this reactivity by learning to relax back into presence, and to respond to difficulty by saying “yes.” Through relaxing back and saying “yes,” we discover our heart’s capacity for unconditional love. …Exploring what it means to unconditionally say “yes” to the li...
Mindful Glimpses: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Loch Kelly
November 02, 2023 19:37 - 1 hour - 33.1 MBMindful Glimpses: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Loch Kelly - Loch Kelly is an author, psychotherapist and highly respected meditation teacher known for his instructions for effortless mindfulness. Our rich and wide-ranging conversation includes themes of interconnectedness, the natural weaves of psychology and meditation, the healing of self-compassion, the power of short glimpses into the nature of reality, RAIN, prayer, awakening through social identities, turning toward dying, center...
Meditation: The Sea of Awareness
November 02, 2023 00:00 - 15 minutes - 7.12 MBMeditation: The Sea of Awareness - Our attention habitually fixates on the foreground of thoughts and feelings, and fuels an unconscious identification with a sense of separate self. This meditation guides us in recognizing the awareness that is the background and source of all experience. By resting in and as the awareness that we are, all sense of separation dissolves revealing the vastness and oneness of Being.
A Conversation with Tara and Stephen Fulder: What is our Refuge in the Midst of Crisis
October 26, 2023 20:07 - 55 minutes - 25.4 MBA Conversation with Tara and Stephen Fulder: What is our Refuge in the Midst of Crisis - Stephen Fulder is a senior Buddhist teacher, author and peace activist who lives and teaches in Israel. In this conversation Stephen shares about his experience during the unfolding violence in the Middle East, and what he and his community are doing to tend to the huge trauma people are feeling. He talks about being with intense fear and emotions, and how to talk with those who have very different views...
Meditation: Awake and Alive
October 25, 2023 23:45 - 18 minutes - 8.27 MBMeditation: Awake and Alive - This guided practice includes a body scan, and an opening to the awareness that includes all of life. From that wakeful openness we offer a relaxed attentiveness to the changing flow, and close with loving kindness to ourselves and our world. TUnNbZ2CdBvG0zsBjT88
Four Spiritual Inquiries: Finding Heart Wisdom in Painful Times
October 19, 2023 20:00 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MBFour Spiritual Inquiries: Finding Heart Wisdom in Painful Times - When we get stuck in difficult emotions like hatred, anger and fear, we are in a trance of separation - disconnected from the whole of our inner experience, each other and the web of life. This talk explores four inquiries that help us reconnect with presence and heart. Rather than reacting with aggression or blame, these inquiries allow us to respond to our struggling world with our naturally wise and caring heart.
Meditation: Relaxing with Life
October 19, 2023 00:30 - 23 minutes - 15.8 MBMeditation: Relaxing with Life - This meditation includes a mindful body scan and guidance in relaxing with the changing waves of experience. When we say “Yes” to the moment, we open to the sea of awareness that can include, with care, whatever arises.