The Infinite Game - From Self-Improvement to Spiritual Freedom
Tara Brach
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...
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Meditation: Open Awareness – Relaxing Back into Presence (19:20 min)
Tara Brach
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.
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Radical Compassion – Loving Ourselves and Our World into Healing – Part 3
Tara Brach
Drawn from Tara’s book, Radical Compassion (2020), these three talks explore how the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) awakens the active, embodied caring that heals and frees our hearts. Through the framework of this practice, we look at how we can reconnect with the gold of our true nature, navigating life’s challenges with mindfulness and love. In Part 3, Tara explores: How the RAIN practice fosters compassion and connection by dismantling barriers to belonging. The three primary blocks to compassion: self-centered attention, creating a "bad other," and fear...
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Meditation: Receiving Life in Open Awareness (16:06 min)
Tara Brach
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.
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Part 2 - Radical Compassion - Loving Ourselves and Our World into Healing
Tara Brach
Drawn from Tara’s book, Radical Compassion (2020), these three talks explore how the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) awakens the active, embodied caring that heals and frees our hearts. Through the framework of this practice, we look at how we can reconnect with the gold of our true nature, navigating life’s challenges with mindfulness and love. In Part 2, Tara explores: How unmet needs and emotional reactivity block authentic connection in relationships. The "limbic controller" and its strategies, such as blame, avoidance, and pretending, that create...
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Meditation: Surrender into Living Presence
Tara Brach
In this guided meditation we begin with a body scan, and rest in awareness with our senses awake. The key practice is to recognize when the mind immerses in virtual reality, reawaken our senses, and surrender again and again into the immediacy, vibrance and mystery of living presence.
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Radical Compassion: Loving Ourselves and Our World into Healing, Part 1
Tara Brach
Drawn from Tara’s book, Radical Compassion (2020), these three talks explore how the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) awakens the active, embodied caring that heals and frees our hearts. Through the framework of this practice, we look at how we can reconnect with the gold of our true nature, navigating life’s challenges with mindfulness and love. In Part 1, Tara explores: How the RAIN practice weaves mindfulness and compassion to release self-judgment and awaken our hearts. The story of the "golden Buddha" as a metaphor for...
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Meditation: Cultivating a Gentle, Kind Attention (19:07 min.)
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.
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The Three Refuges - Gateways to Belonging and Freedom
Tara Brach
We all need ways to guide our attention that allow us to find wisdom, love and freedom in the midst of our lives. This talk reviews three archetypal gateways—Buddha/awareness, Dharma/truth, and Sangha/loving community. Through teachings, guided meditations and a traditional refuge ritual, we engage together in bringing alive these pathways to healing and peace. In this video, Tara explores: Spiritual practice as a journey of remembering our inherent goodness and reconnecting to what truly matters. The Three Refuges—Buddha (awareness), Dharma (truth), and Sangha (community)—as...
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Meditation: Relaxed and Awake (16:59 min.)
Tara Brach
This guided meditation helps us find ease and wakefulness in our body and mind. With the breath as our home base, we offer a gentle and full attention to the changing waves. We close with a beautiful poem, “Walk Slowly,” by Danna Faulds.
info_outlineWhen we fully inhabit our body, we discover the space and wakefulness of awareness itself. In this meditation, we rest in this open awareness, and when the attention narrows into thoughts, we practice relaxing back into the openness that includes passing sounds, sensations and feelings. We close with a brief offering of lovingkindness to our own hearts and our world (with community OMs - no bell at end).