Tara Brach

Tara is joined by two longtime friends and wonderful teachers, Devon and Nico Hase, to explore their recent book, This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership.  This refreshingly real and relatable book offers guidance for anyone wanting to deepen love in their relationships. Drawing from their own lived experience—with humor, humility, and insight—Devon and Nico reveal how partnership can be both challenging and profoundly transformative. In this conversation, they explore what truly supports a deep and loving partnership: how to meet conflict and reactivity, how practice comes alive in everyday moments, how to bring mindful presence into sexuality, and how reflecting on impermanence can deepen intimacy.   While centered on intimate partners, the teachings speak to the whole field of our relationships. The post This Messy, Gorgeous Love—a Conversation with Tara and Devon and Nico Hase appeared first on Tara Brach.

Love is often abstract, and not fully alive. In this practice, with the supportive image and felt sense of a smile, we are guided to awaken loving in our body, mind and whole being. “Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon, quiet ecstasy is there, and a steady, regal sense of resting in a perfect spot. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again, and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here.” – Quote from Radiance Sutras The post Meditation: Embodying Loving Awareness (19:42 min.) appeared first on Tara Brach.

In this talk, we’ll explore the deep evolutionary and spiritual currents that shape our lives—the pull of fear and separation, and the quiet, persistent call toward love, compassion, and belonging. Drawing on stories, reflections, and contemplative practices, this talk invites us to remember that caring is our true nature, even when it feels distant or obscured. Through mindful awareness and heart-centered practices, we begin to sense how our awakened heart calls us—through both the pain of disconnection and the longing for love. As we learn to turn toward our inner experience with kindness, we naturally widen our circles of compassion and deepen our capacity to meet others with presence and care. In this talk, Tara explores: ✨ How compassion is the foundation of human connection and collective healing ✨ The two forces within us: fear-based reactivity and the call of the awakened heart ✨ Why “caring about caring” is itself a doorway to love and transformation ✨ Practices for turning toward vulnerability and deepening empathy (including Tonglen) ✨ How widening our circles of compassion can help heal both personal and global suffering   The post Your Awake Heart Is Calling You: Healing Separation and Returning to Loving Presence appeared first on Tara Brach.

True listening arouses an open receptive presence that can be truly healing. This meditation awakens a listening presence; first bringing that receptive awareness to sensations and sounds, and then offering that presence to the tenderness and vulnerability of our heart. Because the heart dwells in unattended dark, we often forget its sublime sensitivity to everything that is happening to us. Without our ever noticing, the heart absorbs the joy of things and also their pain and care. Within us, therefore, a burdening can accrue. For this reason, it is wise now and again to tune in to your heart and listen for what it carries. Sometimes the simplest things effect unexpected transformation. The old people here used to say that a burden shared is a burdened halved. Similarly, when you allow your heart to speak, the burdens it carries diminish, a new lightness enters your body and relief floods the heart. Let Your Heart Speak, John O’Donohue The post Meditation: Listening to our Heart (22:51 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.

In this conversation, Tara is  joined by Mohsen Mahdawi—Palestinian refugee, Buddhist practitioner, and courageous voice for justice—whose life bridges worlds that are so often held apart. Growing up in a refugee camp and later emerging as a student leader and advocate for Palestinian dignity, Mohsen brings a rare integration of spiritual depth, clarity and dedication to societal transformation. Together they explore how inner awakening can ground fearless activism, what it means to stand for justice amid profound asymmetry of power, how to resist dehumanization in a polarized world, and whether a spiritually rooted movement for collective liberation is quietly emerging in our time. This dialogue is an invitation to reimagine activism as an expression of love, belonging, and courageous presence. Learn more about Mohsen’s work at: http://www.mohsen-mahdawi.com The post Love-Based Activism: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi – Part II appeared first on Tara Brach.

Starting with scanning through the body and awakening the senses, we then rest in presence, with the breath as a home base. The meditation invites an openness to whatever arises, and a gentle kind attention if we encounter physical or emotional pain.  We end with a prayer that includes our own being and all beings. The post Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence (20:21 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.

Listening is an ideal template for awareness itself – it is naturally receptive, open and awake. This meditation invites a deep listening to and feeling our lives, and opens us to the realization of the flow of changing experience and the background awareness that is the source of our Being. The post Meditation: The Pathway of Deep Listening (21:16 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.

In this conversation, Tara is joined by Mohsen Mahdawi—Palestinian refugee, Buddhist practitioner, and courageous voice for justice—whose life bridges worlds that are so often held apart. Growing up in a refugee camp and later emerging as a student leader and advocate for Palestinian dignity, Mohsen brings a rare integration of spiritual depth, clarity and dedication to societal transformation. Together they explore how inner awakening can ground fearless activism, what it means to stand for justice amid profound asymmetry of power, how to resist dehumanization in a polarized world, and whether a spiritually rooted movement for collective liberation is quietly emerging in our time. This dialogue is an invitation to reimagine activism as an expression of love, belonging, and courageous presence. Learn more about Mohsen’s work at: http://www.mohsen-mahdawi.com The post Love-Based Activism: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Mohsen Mahdawi – Part I appeared first on Tara Brach.

How can the simple act of asking a sincere question awaken us from the trance of our habitual thinking? In this talk, Tara Brach explores the transformative power of spiritual inquiry—a practice that guides us beyond our stories and into direct, embodied awareness of what is truly happening within us. Through reflection, teachings from Buddhist wisdom traditions, and guided inquiry, Tara invites us to investigate questions like “What is happening inside me right now?” and “What am I believing?” These questions help reveal the beliefs and emotional patterns that keep us stuck and open the doorway to greater freedom, compassion, and presence. You’ll also learn how inquiry supports the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture)—a powerful method for meeting fear, self-doubt, and emotional suffering with mindful awareness and kindness. By bringing curiosity to our inner life, we begin to loosen the grip of limiting beliefs and rediscover the spacious awareness that is our true nature. In this talk, Tara explores: • How spiritual inquiry helps awaken us from the “interpreted world” of thoughts • Questions that deepen mindfulness and self-awareness • Using inquiry within the RAIN meditation practice • How investigating beliefs can free us from fear and self-judgment • Opening to the mystery and aliveness of present-moment awareness Link to Part 1   The post The Power of Inquiry in Spiritual Awakening – Part 2 appeared first on Tara Brach.

This guided meditation includes a full body scan, and the recognition of the formless awareness that includes and is the source of all experience. By recognizing that awareness we discover the silence and stillness that is the ground of all experience. The post Meditation: Embodied Awareness (18 min.) appeared first on Tara Brach.

Part I – In spiritual life, inquiry arises from our deep yearning to understand reality, and it involves bringing an interested, engaged attention to our immediate experience.  These two talks explore how inquiry serves emotional healing by focusing on difficult “stuck” places, how inquiry enables us to become more intimate and understanding of others, and in the deepest way, how inquiry can reveal the deepest truth of what we are…our true nature. The talks include several guided reflections that can enrich your meditation practice and serve spiritual awakening. “True inquiry doesn’t land on an answer. It opens to a mystery that’s meant to be lived.”       The post The Power of Inquiry in Spiritual Awakening – Part 1 appeared first on Tara Brach.

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. The post Meditation: Inhabiting Awake Awareness (21:49) appeared first on Tara Brach.

Transcript available here: Fear as a Pathway to Loving Presence – Night Travelers Shifting our relationship with fear is central to the evolution of consciousness. Our suffering arises when our thoughts, feelings and sense of identity are shaped by fear. As we learn to attend to fear with mindfulness and care, we discover the vast tender presence that has room for the waves, and can fully cherish this life.   Life’s waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don’t run from it. Night travelers are full of light, and you are too: don’t leave this companionship… The moon appears for night travelers, be watchful when the moon is full. ~ Rumi The post Fear as a Pathway to Loving Presence – Night Travelers appeared first on Tara Brach.

We spend many moments in a trance, time traveling to the past and future, lost in a virtual reality. This meditation helps us collect our attention with our breath, awaken through the body, and open the senses. We then rest in the wakeful openness that includes changing experience, aware of the mystery and vividness of being Here. Photo: Shannon Lavery The post Meditation: Know That You’re Here (19:38 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.

As humans face the darkness of fear, violence, and division, something else is also stirring: an awakening field of courage, care, and connection. This talk explores the primitive survival strategies that keep us in trance and the evolutionary currents of awakening that return us to belonging. Through reflection and practice, we are invited to nurture the river of love and justice moving through our world, and to step forward—together—into beloved community. Photo: Shannon Lavery The post The Bodhisattva Path—Nurturing the River of Caring appeared first on Tara Brach.

This meditation awakens the senses with a mindful scanning of the body, establishes an anchor for presence, and invites us to arrive again and again, deepening the pathway home. When difficult or intense experience arises, the practice is to learn to open to what is here with a clear, allowing and kind attention (a favorite from the archives). Photo: Shannon Lavery The post Meditation: Vipassana – Opening Our Hearts to Life as It Is (20 min.) appeared first on Tara Brach.

While it’s natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence.  This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart. We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening from exclusive identification with a separate ego/self; what it means to die into a larger reality and the similarities of psychedelics and meditation in the process of letting go. The gift of releasing the grip of controlling is true freedom; inhabiting the intrinsic beauty of our beings, and having our lives be an expression of creativity, wisdom and love. Listen and Watch Part 1 – Letting Go of Controlling The post Letting Go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom – Part 2 appeared first on Tara Brach.

In this guided meditation, we explore how true peace and happiness arise not from controlling life, but from gently opening to it. When we meet our moment-to-moment experience with tenderness and awareness, the heart naturally softens into ease. This practice begins by awakening presence in the body and senses—feeling the breath, sensations, and sounds as they are. From there, we widen into a spacious, kind awareness that includes the changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and experience. Rather than pushing away or judging what arises, we learn to rest in a welcoming heart. This meditation supports: ✨ Mindfulness and embodied presence ✨ Emotional healing through non-judgment ✨ Self-compassion and inner peace ✨ Nervous system regulation ✨ Living with greater openness and love We close with a short verse from poet Dorothy Hunt, “Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment,” reminding us that freedom is found right here—in allowing life to be just as it is. Post photo: Paul Van de Riet The post Meditation: A Welcoming Heartspace (18:27 min.) appeared first on Tara Brach.

While it’s natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence.  This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart. We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening from exclusive identification with a separate ego/self; what it means to die into a larger reality and the similarities of psychedelics and meditation in the process of letting go. The gift of releasing the grip of controlling is true freedom; inhabiting the intrinsic beauty of our beings, and having our lives be an expression of creativity, wisdom and love. The post Letting Go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom – Part 1 appeared first on Tara Brach.

This meditation begins with a period of relaxing and collecting our attention with intentional long, deep breathing. We then deepen embodied presence, and widen to the awareness that includes sounds, sensations, feelings, breath, and all experience. When the mind drifts from this open, awake awareness, we gently return, re-relaxing and resting in an easeful, alert presence. Recorded at Tara’s Wednesday night class, the meditation ends with a sense of melting into community – relaxed and alert. Photo Credit: Shannon Lavery The post Meditation: Relaxed and Alert (20:42 min.) appeared first on Tara Brach.