Tara Brach

2014-05-14 - Guided Meditation: Vipassana Instructions

2014-05-07 - Am I Dreaming - As we cultivate mindfulness we become increasingly aware of how we move through huge swaths of our life in trance. This talk reflects on three key domains of trance, and undoing the habitual reactivity that keeps us from the loving, open awareness that is our essence.

2014-04-30 - Part 2 - Conflict - From Fight Flight Freeze to Attend Befriend - How do we reconcile conflict when caught in reactivity sourced in trauma or deep wounding? This talk looks at the need for a larger field of belonging - a trusted other person or safe group - to engender the presence and compassion that enables us to relax and reconnect with our own wholeness and with others.

2014-04-30 - Guided Meditation: Relaxing Back into Wakeful Openness

2014-04-23 - Awakening Through Conflict - As long as we are identified as separate selves, we will inevitably experience conflict with others. If we learn to release blame and deepen attention to our embodied experience, conflict can become a portal for more loving, alive relationships and awakening into the fullness of our being.

2014-04-23 - Meditation - Listening to and Feeling the Moment

2014-04-16 - RAIN - Cultivating a Mindful Presence - The acronym RAIN is a powerful tool for interrupting habitual patterns of emotional reactivity and discovering the freedom of an awake, compassionate presence. This talk explores the components of RAIN, how it works, what makes it transformational and typical challenges people encounter. The teachings include a guided RAIN meditation.

2014-04-16 - Guided Meditation: Breath as Homebase

2014-02-05-Guided Meditation: Metta (Lovingkindness)

2014-04-09 - Loving and Losing - The way that we relate to impermanence and loss shapes our capacity to live and love fully. This talk, drawing on Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods,” explores three elements in our response to this fleeting, precious life that are integral to our healing and freedom.

2014-04-09 - Guided Meditation: Living Presence

2010-08-04 - Guided Meditation - Arriving in Presence

2014-04-02 - Stress and Our Evolving Consciousness - The universal experience of stress (in Buddhism, called dukkha) is a message that we are not realizing, trusting and living from our true nature. Our habitual reactions to stress - grasping, aversion, resistance - deepen emotional pain and lock us in a limiting sense of egoic-self. This talk explores how, with conscious intention and deepened attention, the stressful difficulties we encounter can become the very grounds of healing and spiritual awakening.

2014-04-02 - Guided Meditation: Connecting with Aliveness and Openness

2014-03-26 - Planting Ourselves in the Universe - When we are lost in the trance of thinking, we disconnect from the aliveness, awareness and love that is our source. Mindfulness, a key capacity of our evolving consciousness, awakens us from an identification with thinking and enables us to inhabit a wider realm of Being. This talk explores the confines of conceptual mind and the simple yet powerful practices that cultivate mindful awareness.

2014-03-26 - Guided Meditation: Relaxing into Presence

2014-03-19 - Return of the Prodigal Son - Drawing on Henri Nouwen’s book that interprets this famous parable, this talk looks at the ways we cut off from loving awareness, and the process of homecoming. Our inquiry, reflections and a guided meditation focus on an essential and often overlooked element of transformation: our capacity to trust in love, to let love in.

2014-03-19 - Guided Meditation: Letting Life Live Through You

2014-03-12 - Part 5 - Equanimity - A Heart that is Ready for Anything - Equanimity is the quality of presence that is open, balanced and non-reactive. As this talk explores, when equanimity is lacking, we become easily lost in trance, identified as a defended and controlling egoic self. When present, the solidity and constriction of egoic self dissolves, and our heart is free to respond to life with love, compassion, forgiveness and joy.

2014-03-12 - Guided Meditation: Cultivating a Relaxed Attentiveness

2014-03-05 - Part 4 - Opening to Joy - Our innate capacity for joy is blocked by our habitual ways of paying attention. This talk explores three key pathways of presence that connect us with our full openness and aliveness.

2014-03-05 - Guided Meditation: Dynamic Presence

2014-02-26-Guided Forgiveness Meditation - a short cut from the end of the "A Forgiving Heart" talk

2014-02-26 - Part 3 - A Forgiving Heart - Anger is an intelligent emotion, a natural part of our evolutionary design that lets us know when we are endangered or impeded in our progress. But when it locks into ongoing resentment and blame, our heart becomes armored and we lose access to a wholeness of being. This talk explores forgiving as a process of relaxing our armoring and awakening a healing compassion for ourselves and others.

2014-02-26 - Guided Meditation: A Healing Breath

2014-02-19 - Part 2: Heart of Compassion - Most of us consciously value compassion, but move through much of life without access to the full capacity of our heart. This talk explores the self-compassion that is the very grounds of loving our world.

2014-02-19 - Guided Meditation: Into Stillness

2013-10-07 - Mindfulness in Schools- Enabling Children to Realize their Full Potential - Congressman (OH) Tim Ryan speaks at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD.

2013-10-07 - Mindfulness in Schools- 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 generation, and the healing of our world. Talk given at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD.

2014-02-05 - Part 1: Universal Faces of Love - Lovingkindness, or metta, is the first of the four divine abodes in buddhist teachings. This talk explores the habitual patterns of fears and wants that obscure this innate quality of heart and key ways that we awaken ourselves to its luminous presence.

2014-02-05-Guided Meditation: Listening to and Feeling the Moment (2)

2009-05-02 - Awakening from Virtual Reality - This talk examines how we get stuck in identifying as a separate, deficient self, and the way that a deep attention frees us from trance.

"The invitation of the Path is that we can wake up out of our stories of limitation and blame. We can listen to and touch the longing in us that really wants to love without holding back and live from freedom. And we can then look at what's true within us so deeply that we discover the very awake, empty presence that is our essence. And we can live from that so that our lives become an expression of that realization. An expression of loving presence."

2012-04-28 Guided Heart Meditation: Lovingkindness (metta) from retreat

2014-01-22 - Listening to the Song - 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.

2014-01-22 - Guided Meditation - A Listening Presence

2013-12-29 - 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 the wilderness of our embodied being and encircling this life with love.

2013-12-28 - Walking Meditation Instruction (from the IMCW 2013 New Year's retreat)

2014-01-08 - 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.

2014-01-08 - Guided Meditation: Refuge in Living Presence

2011-02-16 - Part 2 - The Sure Heart's Release - Our longing is to realize and embody loving presence, yet we each have deeply conditioned habits that bind our hearts. This talk reflects on these habits, and explores how we can free ourselves by bringing a mindful, compassionate attention to places where we are most trapped in feeling separate, fearful and unworthy.

2011-02-16 - Guided Meditation: The Center of Now - Includes Body Scan

2011-02-09 - Guided Meditation - The Sky of Awareness

2011-02-29 - Part 1 - The Sure Heart's release - Our longing is to realize and embody loving presence, yet we each have deeply conditioned habits that bind our hearts. This talk reflects on these habits, and explores how we can free ourselves by bringing a mindful, compassionate attention to places where we are most trapped in feeling separate, fearful and unworthy.

No class on December 25 - enjoy a favorite from 2011.

2013-12-18 - 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.

Included at the end: "Holiday Dharma" - fun and song from La Sarmiento as part of IMCW's 2013 winter solstice celebration.

2013-12-18 - Guided Meditation: Being Presence 2

2013-12-11 - 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.

2013-12-11 - Guided Meditation: Space & Aliveness

2013-10-23 - Wings of Homecoming (retreat talk) - Part of incarnating is to feel separate and forget the mysterious oneness that is our home. This talk explores the two dimensions of awareness that when awakened reveal the openness, lucidity and love that expresses our true nature.

2013-11-27 - 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.

2013-11-27 Guided Meditation: Listening to & Feeling the Moment