Tara Brach

Releasing the Habits That Imprison Your Spirit (Part 2) - Addictions of all levels of intensity arise from disconnection and are spiking globally. Humans are experiencing epidemic levels of loneliness, and this combined with engineered products and substances that are highly addictive leads to great suffering. In these two talks, we explore how we get hooked on behaviors that we know cause harm, and how mindfulness and self-compassion can serve our freedom. Key to this process is reconnecting

Meditation: Letting Life Live through You - This meditation awakens the senses and then guides us into the wakeful openness that includes the whole play of sensations, feelings and sound. We become fully awake and alive as we open to the awareness that allows life to live through us.

Pt1 - Releasing the Habits That Imprison Your Spirit - Addictions of all levels of intensity arise from disconnection and are spiking globally. Humans are experiencing epidemic levels of loneliness, and this combined with engineered products and substances that are highly addictive leads to great suffering. In these two talks, we explore how we get hooked on behaviors that we know cause harm, and how mindfulness and self-compassion can serve our freedom. Key to this process is reconnecting with our inner life, and remembering we are in this together, awakening together.

Meditation: Receiving This Life in Awareness - In our everyday life we are conditioned to feel that life is happening to us, or that we are the doer. This meditation deconditions that self-centrality by bringing attention to the aliveness in our bodies, and then opening to receive the entire play of sounds, sensations and feelings in awareness.

Explore the concept of radical acceptance as the root of love and wisdom, and its importance in fully living from our wisdom and love. Reflect on personal experiences and anecdotes to explain the power of seeing and accepting difficult emotions or experiences without resistance. Discuss the impact of resistance on our lives and offer two questions that can help practice radical acceptance. Share a personal anecdote about forgetting to put tofu back in the oven while cooking, leading to frustration and self-criticism. Reflect on the decline of the body and mind, highlighting the power of courageous, unresisting presence.

Meditation: Embodying Acceptance and Care - This guided meditation helps us cultivate a friendly relationship with our experience. Using the image of a smile, we bring a gentle presence alive in our bodies, and then open to the heartspace that includes all facets of life. The meditation closes with a verse from poet, Dorothy Hunt, "Peace is this Moment Without Judgment."

Cultivating Loving Kindness – Seeing the Goodness - The ground of loving kindness is seeing the basic goodness in ourselves, each other and our world. This is what gives rise to pure appreciation, friendliness, love and the felt-sense of belonging. In this talk we explore what obscures and contracts our perceptual field, and the pathway of purposefully awakening this transformational capacity of cherishing all life.

Meditation: Embodied Spirit - Experiencing 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.

Realizing True Nature: A conversation with Hameed Ali and Tara Brach - Hameed Ali is an author, spiritual teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. In this interview we explore ways of approaching awakening to who we are, and look at the importance of befriending the experience of separate self, and actively investigating the blocks - our contracted sense of identity - that obscure the goodness and love of our true nature. Our time weaves in the inspiration of Hameed's most recent book, Nondual Love, (his pen name A.H. Almaas is listed as author.)

Meditation: Inhabiting Awake Awareness - This meditation begins with collecting attention with the breath, and awakens us to the experience of aliveness and inner space by scanning the body. We then open to receive all the senses in awake awareness, and to inhabiting that boundless receptive awareness that is our home.