From the first morning of the IMCW 2017 New Year’s retreat, Tara offers an introductory meditation with a body scan, bringing focus to the breath, sounds, then resting in awareness.

In this meditation, we begin by visualizing benefactors offering us kindness, care and acceptance. We practice to truly let this in, and fill our bodies and minds. Then we begin to generate it for ourselves. (Gratitude to John Makransky for inspiration from his "Receiving the Healing, Liberating Power of Love" meditation.)

We are conditioned to go into a limbic trance—an emotional reactivity to life within and around us—that keeps us identified with a limited, separate sense of self. This talk helps us to identify the flags of trance, and to bring a healing attention that frees us to live our moments with creativity, wisdom and love. Includes the RAIN of Self-Compassion. (from the 2017 IMCW New Year’s Retreat)

This short talk and guided meditation offers an overview of what many people find is a natural unfolding within a meditation sitting. It includes the process of arriving in an embodied presence, learning how to come back from thoughts, and then opening the attention mindfully to the changing flow of experience. The meditation provides generous space between prompts for practice.

This talk and guided meditation includes reflections on how cultivating compassion towards ourselves is essential for our own well-being and happiness—and a key to opening our hearts to the suffering of others. It concludes with a guided self-compassion meditation.

The sign of spiritual freedom is a deep trust in our essential nature, and in the light of awareness that lives through all beings. This talk explores the conditioning that entraps us in a trance of separation and believing in a limited self. We then explore the evolutionary shift in identity that is possible as we deepen our attention and presence to the life that is here, and the loving awareness that is the source of existence.

This talk explores the Buddhist archetype of the bodhisattva and its universal quality across spiritual and other traditions of commitment to the transformation and awakening of one’s own heart for the benefit and freedom of all beings. The civil rights movement in the U.S.—and the role and courage of Rosa Parks and other ordinary people—is presented as a ‘bodhisattva movement’ and a model and encouragement for the challenges we face today.