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 background of the whole domain of physical aliveness.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:53 — 11.6MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSWe spend many life moments in a trance of thinking. This meditation awakens the senses through a body scan, and attention to sound. We then rest in the presence that can come alive in the gap between thoughts—the presence that is our true home.
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.by: Wu Men Hui-k’ai
English version by Stephen Mitchell
Original Language Chinese
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:33 — 12.1MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSAll that we cherish—creativity, love, wisdom, realization—arises from an embodied presence. Yet as we know, the wounds and trauma of our society and individual lives leads toward dissociation. These two talks look at the challenges to awakening through our bodies, and the practices and teachings that guide us on the path.
Listen to Part 1: https://www.tarabrach.com/being-embodied-1/
Listen and watch Part 2 below:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:29 — 38.8MB)
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“I realized I don’t have to believe my thoughts.”
Desire and Addiction (Part 1): Voices of Longing Calling You Home
Listening to the Calling of Our Hearts
Retreat Meditation: Forgiving Ourselves and Others (32:56 min)
Embodied Presence (Part 1) – Planting Our Roots in the Universe
RAIN on Blame: A Guided Meditation (14:40 min.)Awakening awareness in the body is the portal to resting in boundless and dynamic presence. This guided practice scans the body from feet up, and helps us inhabit all parts of our body. As we open to the aliveness and space inside the body, we discover a permeability that allows us to inhabit the universe of aliveness and space, form and formlessness. With this homecoming to whole beingness is an intrinsic experience of freedom.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:14 — 16.6MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSExperiencing our aliveness through our senses is the gateway to resting in formless loving presence. This meditation guides us to awakening through our body, and recognizing the backdrop of silence, of awake awareness, that is the source of all being.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:55 — 11.6MB)
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Blog: Looking Through the Eyes of Another – Transforming Separation into Shared Consciousness
Jonathan Foust tells a compelling story
Blog: Attention – The Most Basic Form of Love
Tara Talks – Opening to Reality Means Full Engagement (not Resignation) (2:31 min.)
Listening To Our LifeResistance Is Futile – 1All that we cherish—creativity, love, wisdom, realization—arises from an embodied presence. Yet as we know, the wounds and trauma of our society and individual lives leads toward dissociation. These two talks look at the challenges to awakening through our bodies, and the practices and teachings that guide us on the path.
Experience the substance of the body and the world as made up of vibrating particles.
From the Radiance Sutra:
And these particles made up of even finer energy particles.
Drifting more deeply, feel into each particle as it condenses from infinity and dissolves back into it continuously.
Noticing this, breathe easily, with infinity dancing everywhere.
Listen to Part 2: https://www.tarabrach.com/being-embodied-part-2/
Listen and watch Part 1 below:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:57 — 32.2MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSThis guided practice has a short period of relaxing the body, and establishes the breath as a home base for attention. We practice arriving again and again, deepening the pathway of homecoming. The meditation ends with lovingkindness for ourselves and our world.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:47 — 12.2MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSThis guided practice emphasizes bringing a gentle and kind attention to our bodies, and then including all experience with a receptive presence. We close by identifying a part of our being that is asking for a healing attention, and offering loving presence to ourself and then to others.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:13 — 15.3MB)
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Stitcher | Overcast | Podbean | Pandora | Spotify | RSSThis 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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:22 — 12.6MB)
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Blog: How to Start a Mindfulness Meditation Group
Worrier Pose – Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk)
Guided Meditation – “At Home in Presence”Letting Go Into Living and Dying
Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering
Meditation – Coming Back to Your Senses (22:00 min)As we relax and awaken through our physical body, we discover the formless dimension of awareness or spirit that permeates all of life. This meditation includes a poem from Mary Oliver.
Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)
Mary Oliver, Dream Work
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:21 — 13.3MB)
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Part 1 of 3 – Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison UsThree Attitudes that Awaken and Free Our SpiritFreedom In the Midst of Fear – Part I
Meditation: The Presence Beyond Thoughts (17:33 min.)RAIN on Blame: A Guided Meditation (14:40 min.)
Realizing Our Undefended and Awakened Heart (retreat talk)
