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.)
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: A Practice of RAIN (20:00 min.)
The acronym RAIN – Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture – guides us in bringing mindfulness and compassion to difficult emotions. With practice, we can find our way home to open-hearted presence in the midst of whatever arises. “Don’t turn...
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...
Taking ‘The Exquisite Risk:’ An Undefended Heart
Poet Mark Nepo uses the phrase “exquisite risk” to describe our willingness to be fully alive, open, available, living true to our heart. This talk explores the challenges and blessings of taking the exquisite risk, both in becoming more intimate with our inner...
Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness (18:25 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 explore how every experience belongs to this infinite awake space of our Being, and can be...
Writing and Haiku as Spiritual Practice: Tara interviews Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg has inspired an entire generation to experience writing as a practice that can awaken our hearts and minds. In this interview Natalie gives guiding tips on approaching writing and, drawing on stories and verses from her beautiful recent book, “Three...
The Power of Spiritual Hope
The openness to possibility is essential on a path of awakening and freedom. In this talk we explore what makes up mature or spiritual hope, and how two meditation practices of presence can nourish our hope. May all beings remember the depth of our longing for full...
Mindful Leadership: A Conversation between Tara Brach and Michelle Maldonado
The principles of mindful leadership are relevant for all of us—they bring out the best of who we are in our work, with our family, with our friends. Especially in these times of mistrust and dividedness, our world desperately needs each of us to cultivate the...
Three Core Reminders for Spiritual Practice
This talk explores three powerful ways you can direct your attention when you find yourself emotionally stuck: Wake up from thoughts; feel your feelings and remember love. We explore both the habits blocking these basic movements toward freedom, and what nourishes...
Trusting the Gold: A Conversation between Tara Brach and Jonathan Foust
In this interview-style conversation, Jonathan asks Tara questions about key themes in her new book, Trusting the Gold. They include their own relationships and ways we work with our inner life and others, in cultivating the capacity to see basic goodness and...
Fierce Self-Compassion – A conversation between Tara Brach and Kristin Neff
Kristin Neff is a pioneer in self-compassion research and a leader in bringing practices of self-compassion alive in our world. This conversation is on her latest book, Fierce Self-Compassion, which helps women awaken both receptive and active dimensions of compassion...
Being Embodied: Gateway to Aliveness and Spirit – Part 2
All 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...