Anger: Responding, Not Reacting

Anger: Responding, Not Reacting

Anger is natural, intelligent and necessary for surviving and flourishing. Yet when we are hooked by anger, it causes great personal and collective suffering. This talk explores how to transform patterns of reactivity by bringing a mindful and compassionate attention...
Meditation: Present Heart (14:37 min)

Meditation: Present Heart (14:37 min)

We awaken a present heart by relaxing with the breath, and bringing the kindness of a smile into our bodily experience. This meditation ends with offering blessings to our inner life and all beings. Photo Credit: Janet Merrick
Meditation: Sitting Like a Mountain (24:32 min)

Meditation: Sitting Like a Mountain (24:32 min)

Meditation can empower us as we learn to access our potential for stability, strength and openness. This meditation calls on the image of a mountain as we awaken our body and mind to a full, vibrant presence. Closes with a metta (loving-kindness) prayer.
Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness (19:32 min.)

Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness (19:32 min.)

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...
A Conversation Between Tara and Mark Nepo

A Conversation Between Tara and Mark Nepo

Mark is a spiritual teacher, wonderful poet, and author of many books including best selling The Book of Awakening. In this wide-ranging and rich conversation, Tara and Mark explore shedding our defenses, faith, compassion for ourselves and others, spiritual practice,...
Meditation: Relaxing Back and Saying Yes to the Moment (18:51 min)

Meditation: Relaxing Back and Saying Yes to the Moment (18:51 min)

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...
Meditation: Resting Your Heart in Presence (20:12 min.)

Meditation: Resting Your Heart in Presence (20:12 min.)

When we’re having difficulty, we typically tense up our body and mind, and armor our heart. This practice offers a pathway of relaxing that tension and tasting the peace that comes from resting in presence. When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night...
Meditation: Saying “Yes” to Life (27:44 min.)

Meditation: Saying “Yes” to Life (27:44 min.)

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. In the shared quiet,...
Humility

Humility

In Buddhism and most faiths, humility – feeling that we all share common ground, feeling neither superior or inferior to others – is both a prerequisite to awakening and an expression of mature spirituality. This talk explores how our conditioning and culture...
Meditation: Living Presence – with Body Scan (17 min)

Meditation: Living Presence – with Body Scan (17 min)

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...
Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (21:33 min.)

Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (21:33 min.)

This 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...
Heart Meditation: Taking in the Goodness (24:31 min.)

Heart Meditation: Taking in the Goodness (24:31 min.)

Taking in the Goodness: Rumi said, “Whenever some kindness comes to you, turn that way – toward the source of kindness.” This meditation guides us to look for the source of loving and to turn in that direction. It begins with a lovingkindness practice that spreads the...
Meditation: The Heartspace of Gratitude (18:30 min.)

Meditation: The Heartspace of Gratitude (18:30 min.)

When gratitude for our life arises, we enter the sacred space of an open heart. This meditation guides us in arriving in presence and awakening the blessings of gratitude. Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the...
Meditation: The Heartspace Where All is Welcome (18:51 min.)

Meditation: The Heartspace Where All is Welcome (18:51 min.)

This meditation scans through the body, and awakens attention to the open, inclusive awareness that all life arises in. We then explore experiencing that openness in the region of the heart, saying yes to life and including whatever is here with unconditional...