Resources: Nature of Awareness
When Siddhartha (the Buddha) looked into his own mind, he realized the beauty, purity and goodness of his essential nature and was free. The most basic qualities of our being—openness/emptiness, wakefulness, and love—are always here. Getting to know these qualities, and learning to trust and live from them, is truly the heart of the path. Gradually we realize that this awake, tender awareness is more who we are than any story we’ve been believing about ourselves. Rather than a human on a spiritual path, we are spirit– formless loving presence– discovering itself through a human incarnation. As we come to understand and trust this, our life fills with increasing grace.
For more on the Nature of Awareness, you might explore Radical Acceptance – Chapter 12, and True Refuge – Chapters 14 and 15.
Talks on the Nature of Awareness
Trusting Who We Are (retreat talk)
When we are suffering, we are believing something untrue - usually a limiting story about who we are. This talk explores the roots of our self-doubts, and the teachings and...
Three Blessings in Spiritual Life – Part 3: A Mirror
This 3- part series explores three capacities we all have, that when cultivated, bring spiritual awakening and serve the healing of our world. Drawing on an ancient teaching...
Homecoming to Loving Awareness (retreat talk)
We have strong conditioning to identify as a separate self, and to feel all the fears and attachments that arise from not realizing our true belonging. This talk includes...
Awakening from the Trance of Self-Centeredness
At the core of our suffering is our universal human predicament: an illusion that we are a separate self. This talk explores how this identification as a self obscures our...
Realizing True Nature: A conversation with A.H. Almaas and Tara Brach
A.H. Almaas is an author, spiritual teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. In this interview we explore ways of approaching awakening to who we are, and...
Emptiness Dancing: Inquiring into the Nature of Awareness (retreat talk)
Our True Nature - Emptiness Dancing (retreat talk) The most profound question in spiritual life is “who (or what) am I?” This talk explores ways of inquiring into the nature of...
Three Blessings in Spiritual Life – Part 3: A Mirror
Three Blessings in Spiritual Life – Part 3: A Mirror - This 3- part series explores three capacities we all have, that when cultivated, bring spiritual awakening and serve the...
Homecoming to Your True Nature: Awakening Beyond the Separate, Fearful Self
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...
After the RAIN: The Flowering of Awake Awareness – Part 2
The blessing of the spiritual path is a homecoming to our essential nature—wakeful, loving awareness. These two talks explore the grounds of that awakening, which is a shift of...
After the RAIN: The Flowering of Awake Awareness – Part I
The blessing of the spiritual path is homecoming to our essential nature—wakeful, loving awareness. These two talks explore the grounds of that awakening, which is a shift of...
Namaste: Honoring the Light in All Beings
The ritual of Namaste - bowing to the sacred in ourselves and others - helps us live from the loving awareness that is our true nature. This talk looks at how we suffer because...
The Power of Awake Awareness (retreat talk)
We all encounter “demons” of fear, anger, hurt, craving and shame. This talk explores our key ways of resisting difficult emotions, and how “when the resistance is gone, the...
Wise Investigation: Dissolving the Trance
If we are suffering, it is because we are believing something that is not true and caught in emotional reactivity. A key tool in meditation is investigation – actively inquiring...
Three Domains of Formless Presence – Landlocked in Fur (retreat talk)
While we have evolved to experience a defining sense of separate self, our potential is to awaken to the formless dimension – the pure awareness is our shared source. This talk...
Trusting Who We Are (retreat talk)
The sign of spiritual freedom is a deep trust in our essential nature, and in the light of awareness that lives through all beings. This talk explores the conditioning that...
Meditations on the Nature of Awareness
Meditation: Open Awareness – Relaxing Back into Presence (19:20 min)
This guided meditation practice brings attention to the continuous space within and around the body, and the aliveness of sound, sensation and feeling that lives through us....
Meditation: Embodying Loving Awareness (19:39 min.)
Love is often abstract, and not fully alive. In this practice, with the supportive image and felt sense of a smile, we are guided to awaken loving in our body, mind and whole...
Meditation: Disarming Our Hearts (10:53 min.)
Most of us know the suffering of feeling separate from others. In this guided meditation, we explore how we can re-open our hearts by intentionally bringing a caring mindful...
Meditation: Awareness and Flow (20:17 min.)
This guided practice awakens all the senses with an embodied presence, allowing an opening to the moment-to-moment changing flow of experience. We then relax back, resting as the...
Meditation: Lighting Up Your Energy Body (18 min.)
Our being has many frequencies of aliveness and as we attend to the more subtle, we discover a portal to the radiant awareness that is always here. This meditation guides us in...
Meditation: Open Awareness – Relaxing Back into Presence (19:23 min)
This guided meditation practice brings attention to the continuous space within and around the body, and the aliveness of sound, sensation and feeling that lives through us....
Meditation: Awakening through the Inner Body (21:56 min)
When we attune to the inner body, we discover a field of energy and aliveness that is the portal to pure presence. This meditation guides our attention to the inner body, opens...
Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness (19:53 min.)
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...
Guided Meditation: The Sea of Awareness (15:34 min.)
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...
Meditation: Continuous Space Suffused with Awareness (19:07 min.)
By learning to inhabit the body, we discover the space and aliveness that fills the universe. In this meditation we are guided through the body, filling different domains with...
Meditation: Opening to the River of Aliveness (17:53 min.)
This meditation guides us to awaken to sensation using the image of a smile and scanning through the body. We then open to sound and to the entire changing flow of experience....
Meditation: Being the Ocean and Opening to the Waves (retreat) (26:55 min.)
We can’t truly open to the waves of life unless we recognize our Oceanness, the formless awareness that is our source. This meditation begins with awakening the senses and then...
Meditation: Being a Kind Witness (18:47 min.)
Learning to witness what is going on inside us is the gateway to inner freedom and deep realization. This meditation guides us in witnessing our experience with a non-judging and...
Instruction and Meditation: Pathway to Non-Doing Presence (41:30 min.)
While meditation begins with purposeful collecting of attention, it leads to non-doing presence, to Being. In this guided practice, we arrive in presence through a body scan and...
Meditation: Relaxing Back into Awareness (21:28 min.)
When we are in our daily trance, we are often leaning forward, on our way somewhere else. In this meditation we are guided to relax back into the awareness that is always,...
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