Talks: Reflections on the Path
Listening to the Song
NOTE: Tara was away this week, so asked that we post a favorite from the archives:
Listening with our full heart and attention is the gateway to understanding and love. This talk explores the challenges to deep listening, and offers ways of paying attention that awaken a healing listening presence.
Realizing Our Undefended and Awakened Heart (Retreat Talk)
It is our evolutionary and spiritual potential to release unnecessary habits of violating other tribes, individuals and unwanted parts of our own being. This talk explores three essential facets of the pathway to awakening: Leaving the fortress of aversive judgment, entering...
Path of True Refuge
This talk explores the three archetypal gateways to liberation – awareness (Buddha), truth (Dharma) and love (Sangha). It includes guided reflections and a refuge ceremony that can help us discover the path “inside out” through daily life
NOTE: Stuart Rakoff’s blog is here:
http://stuspeaks.wordpress.com/
Part 2: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love
This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence - in relating inwardly and in communicating with others - that awakens and frees our hearts....
Part 1: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love
This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence – in relating inwardly and in communicating with others – that awakens and frees our hearts.
The Evolving of Generosity
This talk explores how we can open out of the habit of grasping and deliberately nourish our natural capacity for generosity, for living love.
Accessing Innate Wisdom
Wisdom is an innate capacity, but often covered over by trance. This talk explores how we abandon ourselves as we busily seek ways to feel more worthy, loveable and safe. We then look at the pathway home, the radical non-doing and space of silence that allows wisdom and love to flow through.
Part 2: Vulnerability, Intimacy, & Spiritual Awakening
We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this unlived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization. These talks explore the ways that we defend ourselves, and the pathway to gently, wisely and intelligently disarming and freeing our hearts.
Monday Night Satsang – Question and Response
Question and response from Tara's monthly evening satsang on 2013-11-11. NOTE: Satsang means exploring and realizing truth in the gathering of spiritual friends. The word comes from Sanskrit – “sat” means truth – and “sangha” is community or company of spiritual...
Part 1: Vulnerability, Intimacy, & Spiritual Awakening
We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this unlived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization. These talks explore the ways that we defend ourselves, and the pathway to gently, wisely and intelligently disarming and freeing our hearts.
Healing Self-Doubt
Siddhartha Gautama’s last challenge before enlightenment was doubt, and to some degree, most of us live with limiting beliefs about our own worthiness and goodness. This talk looks at the tenacity of self-doubt and the power of mindfulness, investigation and compassion in releasing its grip.
Guided Forgiveness Practice (from fall 2013 IMCW retreat)
Instructions, then a guided forgiveness meditation.
The Heartspace That is Our True Home (retreat talk)
By dedicating ourselves to loving the life that is right here–ourselves–we discover the heartspace that holds this world. This talk explores the pathways of forgiveness, offering and letting in love, and gratitude that reveal the vastness of loving presence.
Part 2: Happiness
This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through.
Satsang – Closing Prayer for Peace (6:58 min.)
A Prayer for Peace from Tara at the Monday evening satsang gathering. NOTE: Satsang means exploring and realizing truth in the gathering of spiritual friends. The word comes from Sanskrit – “sat” means truth – and “sangha” is community or company of spiritual...
Evening Satsang – “Peace is This Moment”
(published for the first time):
Question and response with Tara from 2013-10-14. Questions relate to a reading of Dorothy Hunt’s poem, “Peace is This Moment Without Judgment,” as well as to RAIN, meditation practice and self-judgment. The evening closes with a prayer for peace.
Part 1: Happiness
This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through.
Mindfulness in Education: Enabling Children to Realize their Full Potential
This talk explores stress-related emotional suffering and how mindfulness and compassion practices can serve our children’s natural intelligence, creativity and openheartedness. Trainings in presence are the hope for this next […]
Loving Life, Loving Earth
What will it take to have us collectively awaken to the suffering of our earth and respond? This talk looks at how we are destroying our larger body, the earth; what stops us from recognizing and opening to the suffering of loss, and ways we can evolve our consciousness and act on behalf of this precious life.
Part 2: Entering the Wilderness
On all spiritual paths, we journey into the inner wilderness to discover the nature of nature – the truth of who we are. The entry is through bringing a kind and full presence to the life of our bodies. These two talks explore the conditioning that leads us to dissociation, and the blessings of full aliveness, open heartedness and wisdom that arise when we come home to embodied presence.
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