The Transformative Power of Deep Listening: Healing Ourselves and Our World, Part 1
Tara Brach
Listening is more than a communications skill, it is a capacity that awakens our awareness. And given our current times, this capacity is essential if we are to navigate the great divides that separate us from our inner life and others. As we learn to listen inwardly, we begin to understand and care for the fears and vulnerability that ask for our attention. And as we listen to others, that same intimacy emerges. In this two-part series we examine the blocks to listening and the practices that cultivate this essential domain of human potential. Our focus is both on the transformational power...
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Meditation: The Sky-like Mind (20:29 min.)
Tara Brach
This meditation begins with listening to sounds as a portal to spacious awareness. In addition to guiding attention to naturally occurring sounds, Tara plays chimes and gongs to deepen the experience of receptivity and openness. The meditation progresses to include all experience - sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings - in the vast, transparent, timeless space of awareness.
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The Healing Power of Imagination: Transform Yourself and the World, Part 2
Tara Brach
What if a key to personal and collective transformation lies in reclaiming our deep capacities for presence and imagination? In this two-part series, we’ll explore how mindfulness awakens us from the trance of fear and separation, reconnecting us with our innate clarity and compassion. And we’ll discover how imagination, when grounded in presence, becomes a superpower—allowing us to envision new possibilities for our lives, our relationships, and our world. These talks include reflections that activate imagination in ways that can heal our hearts, deepen connection with others and help...
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Meditation: Pathway to Inner Peace (20:41 min.)
Tara Brach
“Peace is this moment without judgment,” writes poet Dorothy Hunt, “this moment in the heart-space where everything that is, is welcome.” This meditation is a guide to opening to the truth of what’s here, and meeting it with a gentle, allowing presence. As we do, we can touch the inner peace of non-judging awareness, and source our actions in that balance and wisdom.
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The Healing Power of Imagination: Transform Yourself and the World, Part 1
Tara Brach
This two-talk series explores how spiritual imagination can awaken us to our deepest potential for healing and transformation. In times of fear and division, our imagination often contracts, fueling separation and suffering, yet through mindful presence we can reconnect with our basic goodness and the goodness in others. Through inquiry and story, we can imagine what’s possible—personally and collectively—when we trust in our shared capacity for change, belonging, and wise hope.
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Meditation: Resting in Wakeful Presence (18:55 min.)
Tara Brach
This meditation scans through the body – arriving in the foreground with sounds, feelings and sensations, like the surface waves of the sea coming and going. And in the background, experiencing an alert inner stillness – a vast presence from which all activity pours forth.
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Namaste: Honoring the Light in All Beings
Tara Brach
The ritual of Namaste – bowing to the sacred in ourselves and others – helps us live from the loving awareness that is our true nature. This talk looks at how we suffer because we forget this basic goodness, and explores the pathways of remembering that carry us home. In this talk, Tara explores the sacred meaning of “Namaste” as a living practice—an invitation to see past the masks we wear and honor the light and goodness in all beings. how our “spacesuit self”—a conditioned identity shaped by fear and separation—can obscure our true nature, and how mindfulness...
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Meditation: From Head to Full Being
Tara Brach
When we are lost inside thoughts we lose connection with our heart, aliveness and spirit. This meditation guides us to a wakeful presence and invites us to return over and over from virtual reality into the mysterious, tender vastness that is our true being.
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Stories That Imprison Our Heart - Part 2
Tara Brach
Our suffering arises from fear-based stories that are often outside our awareness. These include stories of our deficiency or importance, of being a victim, of being unseen or unloved, of facing failure or rejection. This is true collectively too. We have shared stories of bad “others” that fuel wars, shared stories of the value of continued growth in consumption and production that destroy our earth, shared stories of our human right to enslave and violate other animals. We have the capacity to bring the stories that separate and imprison us into the light of awareness, and with great...
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Meditation: Arriving in Embodied Presence (23:59 min)
Tara Brach
This meditation guides you to arrive fully in embodied presence—awakening through the senses, relaxing into the breath, and gently returning to the aliveness of the here and now. With a nurturing blend of body scan, mindful breathing, and open awareness, you’re guided to soften habitual tension and rest in a spacious, receptive presence. Whether you stay with a primary anchor or open to the changing flow of sensations and sound, this practice offers a refuge in stillness and self-compassion. A beautiful way to ground, reconnect, and simply be.
info_outlineNOTE: Tara invites you to use this 15-minute meditation to help nurture a steady and strong practice during her upcoming Introduction to Mindfulness series.
Mindfulness Meditation, also known as Vipassana or insight meditation, is a practice of cultivating non-judging attention to our moment-to-moment experience. We begin by gently relaxing through the body and resting attention on the breath—or another sensory anchor—allowing the mind to settle. From this grounded presence, we open to whatever arises: sensations, emotions, sounds, or thoughts, meeting each with clarity and kindness.
The intention is to wake up from the trance of thinking and return, again and again, to the aliveness of immediate experience. Over time, this practice helps us develop a steady heart amidst change and brings deep insight into the nature of reality.