Tara Brach
Religion & Spirituality
About
Tara Brach, Ph.D is an internationally known meditation teacher and author of bestselling Radical Acceptance and True Refuge. Tara shares a weekly guided meditation and talk that blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices. The podcast addresses the value of mindfulness meditation and self-compassion in relieving emotional suffering, serving spiritual awakening and bringing healing to our world.
Episodes
- Lovingkindness - Part 1 of Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love
In this episode, Tara Brach explores the nature of lovingkindness, how it can be blocked by habitual patterns, and how to nurture and realize this innate capacity through mindful practices. This is Part 1 of her series, "Present Heart: The…
- Meditation: Living Presence (21:35 min.)
This meditation by Tara Brach focuses on awakening the senses through body scanning and listening to sounds. It guides individuals to relax and rest in formless awareness, encompassing all passing experiences.
- Flourishing in an Unraveling World: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Richard Davidson
Tara Brach and Richard Davidson discuss what it means to flourish in a challenging world. They explore the science and practice of well-being, including awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, and how these concepts can lead to a more…
- Meditation: Touching Peace (23:12 min.)
This guided meditation focuses on quieting the mind and calming anxiety using long deep breathing, body relaxation, and relaxed awareness. It concludes with a verse from Philip Booth.
- The Honesty Challenge - Getting More Truthful with Ourselves and Our World
This episode of Tara Brach, "The Honesty Challenge," explores the practice of radical self-honesty. It discusses how facing internal difficulties can lead to greater honesty with others, fostering more love and freedom in life.
- Meditation: Vipassana - The Practice of Seeing Clearly (18:31 min.)
This episode introduces Vipassana meditation, also known as insight meditation, focusing on bringing clear, mindful attention to present moment experiences. It covers relaxing the body, resting attention with the breath, and observing sens…
- Compassion in Times of Conflict—a Conversation with Tara, Paul Gilbert, and Rick Hanson
This episode features Tara Brach, Paul Gilbert, and Rick Hanson discussing how compassion can arise during conflict. They explore evolutionary conditioning, the brain's threat system, and methods to shift from reactivity to presence, under…
- Meditation: Widening Rings of Being (20:26 min.)
This Tara Brach meditation focuses on recognizing thoughts and awakening the senses to experience a reality beyond the confines of thoughts. It guides listeners to discover the freedom of being.
- This Messy, Gorgeous Love—a Conversation with Tara and Devon and Nico Hase
Tara Brach, joined by Devon and Nico Hase, discusses their book "This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership." They explore navigating conflict, mindful presence in relationships, and deepening intimacy through refle…
- Meditation: Embodying Loving Awareness (19:42 min.)
This episode features Tara Brach guiding a meditation practice on embodying loving awareness. Listeners are guided to awaken loving in their body, mind, and whole being using the supportive image and felt sense of a smile.
- Your Awake Heart Is Calling You: Healing Separation and Returning to Loving Presence
This episode explores the evolutionary and spiritual currents that shape our lives, focusing on the pull of fear and separation versus the call toward love, compassion, and belonging. It discusses mindful awareness and heart-centered pract…
- Meditation: Listening to our Heart (22:52 min)
This guided meditation from Tara Brach focuses on mindful awareness of breath and sensation to connect with the body and heart. It aims to reduce stress and cultivate self-compassion, with a reflective reading from John O'Donohue.
- Love-Based Activism: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi - Part II
This episode features Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi discussing love-based activism, emphasizing inner awakening as a basis for fearless activism. They explore themes of justice, resisting dehumanization, and the emergence of a spiritually…
- Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence (20:21 min)
This meditation from Tara Brach guides listeners through body scanning and breath awareness, encouraging an open and kind attention to any physical or emotional pain that may arise. It concludes with a prayer for oneself and all beings.
- Love-Based Activism: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi - Part I
In this conversation, Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi discuss love-based activism, inner awakening, and standing for justice. They explore how to resist dehumanization in a polarized world and the potential for a spiritually rooted movement…
- Meditation: The Pathway of Deep Listening (21:16 min)
This meditation focuses on deep listening as a path to awareness, inviting listeners to feel their lives and connect with changing experiences and background awareness. The episode is presented by Tara Brach.
- The Power of Inquiry in Spiritual Awakening - Part 2
Tara Brach explores the transformative power of spiritual inquiry, a practice that guides beyond stories into embodied awareness. She discusses how inquiry helps awaken us from habitual thoughts, deepens mindfulness, and supports the RAIN…
- Meditation: Embodied Awareness (18 min.)
This guided meditation from Tara Brach focuses on embodied awareness, incorporating a full body scan. It aims to help listeners recognize formless awareness and discover the silence and stillness underlying experience.
- The Power of Inquiry in Spiritual Awakening - Part 1
This episode explores the power of inquiry in spiritual awakening. It covers how inquiry aids emotional healing, deepens understanding of others, and reveals one's true nature. The talks include guided reflections for meditation practice.
- Meditation: Inhabiting Awake Awareness (21:49)
This meditation by Tara Brach guides listeners to collect attention with their breath, scan their body to experience aliveness and inner space, and open to receive all senses in awake awareness. The practice aims to help individuals inhabi…
- Fear as a Pathway to Loving Presence - Night Travelers
This episode explores the concept of fear as a pathway to loving presence. It discusses how suffering arises when thoughts and identity are shaped by fear, and how mindfulness can help in attending to fear to discover a tender presence and…
- Meditation: Know That You're Here (19:38 min)
This meditation by Tara Brach guides listeners to be present by focusing on their breath, body, and senses, moving away from past or future distractions. It encourages resting in a state of wakeful openness, embracing the vividness of the…
- The Bodhisattva Path—Nurturing the River of Caring
This episode discusses navigating fear, violence, and division by cultivating courage, care, and connection. It explores primitive survival strategies versus evolutionary awakening and invites listeners to nurture love and justice.
- Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is (20 min.)
This episode features a Vipassana meditation practice by Tara Brach. It guides listeners through mindful body scanning and establishing an anchor for presence. The practice emphasizes opening to difficult experiences with clear, allowing,…
- Letting go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom, Part 2
This episode, "Letting Go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom, Part 2," with Tara Brach, explores how chronic controlling disconnects us from presence and how releasing this grip can lead to an expression of creativity, wisdom, and love. I…
- Meditation: A Welcoming Heartspace (18:27 min)
This guided meditation explores finding peace by opening to life with tenderness and awareness. It focuses on mindfulness, embodied presence, emotional healing through non-judgment, and self-compassion.
- Letting go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom, Part 1
This episode, "Letting Go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom, Part 1," with Tara Brach, explores how releasing control over thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and emotions can lead to freedom. It examines the process of awakening from ego ident…
- Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (20:43 min.)
This Tara Brach meditation guides listeners to a state of relaxed and alert awareness. It utilizes deep breathing and embodied presence to cultivate an open, awake awareness of sounds, sensations, and feelings.
- 3 Degrees Friendlier: Small Shifts That Transform Everything
This episode explores the concept of friendliness, examining why it diminishes under stress and how simple practices can restore it. The discussion covers the impact of increased friendliness on one's inner life and daily interactions.
- Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life (18:33 min.)
This episode features a meditation practice that focuses on establishing a gentle and caring presence. It guides listeners to use the felt sense of a smile, settle with the breath, and relax with whatever arises, promoting a friendly atten…
- Meditation: Receiving Life in Open, Awake Awareness (20:34 min.)
This meditation focuses on awakening receptive attention to the senses, starting with physical sensations and moving to sound. It explores how open, awake awareness receives the arising and passing moments of life and the experience of the…
- How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2
This episode explores how hope can be a healing and liberating force when rooted in awareness, trust, and compassionate action. It discusses the mature expression of hope, its importance on the spiritual path, and how to recognize its shad…
- How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1
This episode discusses how hope can heal and free us, exploring its role on the spiritual path, its shadow aspects, and methods to nurture it. It focuses on the aspiration for full potential, trusting this possibility, and engaging energy…
- Meditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness (21:30 min.)
This Tara Brach meditation guides listeners to awaken their full aliveness by connecting to inner sensations and sound, fostering a state of receptive and dynamic presence.
- Coming Home to True Refuge | Finding Peace Through Awareness, Truth, and Love
This episode explores finding refuge through awareness, truth, and love, drawing on Buddhist understanding. It aims to help listeners find inner peace and a sense of belonging through guided reflections.
- Meditation: Energy and Source (19:35 min)
This Tara Brach meditation guides listeners to step away from incessant thinking and connect with their body, breath, and awareness. It aims to help individuals inhabit their energetic form and rest in boundless stillness for inner peace a…
- Seeing the Light in Each Other
This episode explores recognizing the sacred goodness in others beyond their personality. It delves into how reflecting this goodness can help individuals trust their divine essence and interconnectedness.
- Meditation: Meeting Life with a Kind Presence (21:26 min.)
This Tara Brach meditation practice focuses on developing a kind presence. It includes guided listening, a body scan, and resting in open awareness.
- Meditation: The Center of Now (22:26 min)
This episode explores meditation as a way to access presence through body awareness and sound. It discusses discovering a centered, pure presence through full allowing.
- The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention 2
This episode discusses the liberating power of conscious intention, exploring how it can guide life experience and awaken mindfulness. It addresses finding healing and freedom from suffering through deep intention, with reflections and pra…
- The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention 1
This episode discusses the liberating power of conscious intention. It explores how to awaken mindfulness of intention and find healing and freedom through deep intention.
- Meditation on Intention (22:39 min.)
This guided meditation by Tara Brach explores the power of intention. It uses gentle breath awareness and a relaxing full-body scan to help listeners reconnect with their inner selves.
- The Evolving of Generosity
This episode explores generosity as a central Buddhist practice, contrasting the "not enough" mindset with the natural ease of an open heart. It suggests that mindful giving reconnects individuals with their innate goodness and fosters joy.
- Meditation: Inner Space - Gateway to Open Awareness (20:08)
This Tara Brach meditation, "Inner Space - Gateway to Open Awareness," is adapted from "Open Focus" meditations. It guides listeners through a spontaneous exploration of awareness using questions that start with "Can you imagine...?"
- Awakening Compassion in a Fearful World: The Practice of Tonglen
This episode explores how compassion arises and how to transform suffering into care. It uses reflections, stories, and the Tibetan practice of tonglen to re-open relational pathways.
- Meditation: Collecting, Unifying and Opening the Mind (21:56 min.)
This episode explores meditation practices for collecting, unifying, and opening the mind. It emphasizes listening with attention to sounds and bodily sensations, and bringing a receptive awareness to the breath.
- Clearing Space for Spirit: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Patty Morrissey
Tara Brach and Patty Morrissey have a conversation about spirituality, foundational habits for an inner life, the role of humor, and tidiness as a liberating act. The episode includes two short guided meditations.
- Meditation: Continuous Space Suffused with Awareness (19:21 min.)
This meditation guides listeners through the body, filling different domains with presence. It then opens into the continuous awake space within and surrounding the body, observing the changing flow of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and s…
- Trauma: The Light Shines through the Broken Places
This episode discusses trauma and how meditation practices can support spiritual healing. It focuses on practices that help access love and safety, and increase the capacity to bring presence to unprocessed experiences in the body.
- Meditation: Breath by Breath - Relaxing with Our Life (19:04 min.)
This episode offers a guided meditation that focuses on using the breath as a portal to presence. It guides listeners through relaxing with the breath, incorporating a body scan, and using the breath as an anchor for wandering thoughts.