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Tara Brach

This meditation calls on the image and felt sense of a smile as we scan through the body, and invites a receptive and caring presence, as we open our attention to the changing flow of life.

Meditation: Cultivating a Gentle, Kind Attention (19:07 min.)

Our habit is to try to manage our experience from a mental control tower. This meditation awakens us through the body, and then invites us to rest in that vast presence that includes the changing flow of life. When we inhabit that openness, there’s a natural arising of peace, wakefulness and tenderness.

Meditation: Receiving Life in Open Awareness (16:06 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. While it’s natural for attention to get distracted, the pathway home is a relaxing back into presence – the awake space that is aware of this changing life.

Meditation: Open Awareness – Relaxing Back into Presence (19:20 min)

While meditation is widely practiced in today’s world, many miss the opportunity to tap into its profound potential to awaken the heart and mind. Beyond its surface benefits, meditation can guide us to the radiant light, boundless love, and pure awareness that is our true nature. This reflection explores how we often lose touch with the deeper possibility meditation offers, and guides us in approaching practice and daily life in a way that opens us to the timeless freedom and awakening of a Buddha.
 
In this week’s talk, Tara explores:
 
 • Ways that deepening our meditation practice can help us navigate personal and collective challenges with greater ease.
 • The power of mindful presence to awaken compassion and build resilience in the face of difficulty.
 • Self-compassion as an essential practice for healing and reconnecting with our inner goodness.
 • The transformative role of spiritual community (sangha) in nurturing belonging and shared purpose.
 • How the practices of mindfulness and self-compassion can help us awaken from habitual reactivity and find a greater sense of connectedness and freedom.

The Infinite Game - From Self-Improvement to Spiritual Freedom

Many recognize that love is the antidote to the suffering in our divided world, yet finding the path to an open heart can feel more challenging than ever. This talk explores the full spectrum of love—both tender and open, as well as fierce, protective, and engaged. When we cultivate this courageous love, we are able to hold even those we see as enemies in our hearts. In its true form, this love is not passive or soft. As Martin Luther King Jr. described, it is a powerful soul force, capable of bringing healing and liberation to all beings.
 
In this talk, Tara explores:
 
 • how mindfulness serves as a powerful tool for cultivating compassionate awareness
 • the importance of unarming our heart as a pathway to Radical Acceptance,
 • the deep connection between courage and an awake heart
 • the true connection that arises when we fully arrive in the moment.
 • the power of the “sacred pause”—how presence allows us to open to love in difficult times

Meeting these Times with Courageous Love

This meditation guides us to awaken to our senses through scanning through the body and then listening to sounds. When distracted by thoughts we relax open again and again, learning to rest in the formless awareness that includes sounds, sensations and all passing experience.

Meditation: Living Presence (21:08 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 presence.

Meditation: The Heartspace Where All is Welcome (18:40 min.)

We arrive in presence by deepening attention in the body; relaxing and awakening through a body scan. That presence deepens as we bring our attention to the space of awareness that includes the changing flow of sounds, sensations and feelings. In that wholeness of formlessness and form, we discover our natural being - open, awake and tender.

Meditation: The Space and Aliveness of Presence (21:56 min.)

Part 4: Equanimity - unfolds as we find a wise balance and spaciousness in the midst of this living, dying world.
 
 
 
This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.
 
 
 
In this talk, Tara explores:
 
 
 
 • A Heart Ready for Anything – Practical reflections and meditations to cultivate equanimity in relationships and daily life.
 • The Wisdom of Equanimity – How balance and spacious awareness free us from reactivity and deepen our capacity for love.
 • Equanimity as the Ground for Compassion – The role of equanimity in keeping love from contracting into attachment and compassion from turning into pity.
 • Navigating Emotional Waves – The metaphor of the ocean and waves to cultivate presence amidst life’s inevitable challenges.
 • The Shadow Side of Equanimity – How indifference can masquerade as equanimity and the importance of staying engaged with life.

Equanimity - Part 4 of Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love

In daily life we often leave ourselves, get lost in thoughts, and cut off from a direct, openhearted experience of our life. This meditation reconnects by opening all the senses, turning towards the awareness that is here, and resting in the awakened heartspace that includes and tenderly holds our moment to moment experience (a special favorite from the archives).

Meditation: Coming Home to Openhearted Awareness (19 min.)

Meditation: Refuge in Presence (2021-12-08) - We arrive in presence through the gateway of the body, scanning through with awareness, and then resting with the breath and body sensations. As we include whatever arises with a gentle and kind attention, our inner refuge becomes increasingly stable and openhearted. This meditation ends with a brief loving-kindness prayer.

Meditation: Refuge in Presence (2021-12-08)

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