What gives us the inner strength to meet life’s challenges with resilience, heart and wisdom? Drawing on themes in Lori’s new book, “The Tiny Buddha’s Inner Strength Journal,” Tara and Lori explore the mindset that is conducive to growth, working with negative beliefs, ways of transforming fear, and what it means to have inner strength in facing loss and death. We also talk about what can most empower and energize us in responding to a world struggling with multiple crises. NOTE: Find Lori Deschene’s “The Tiny Buddha’s Inner Strength Journal” here: tinybuddha.com/strong. Lori also created several free companion resources, available at tinybuddha.com/strength-tools.

A vegetarian diet, while encouraged in most schools of Buddhism, isn’t a requirement of the Buddhist path. But there are powerful spiritual opportunities in embracing a plant-based diet. Following a vegetarian or plant-based diet is one way to practice compassion, reduce harm, and recognize our interconnectedness with all living beings and the earth itself. So what does the dharma say about vegetarianism? How might plant-based eating support our spiritual practice?

The medicine our world most needs is compassion, and it is crucial that this include all living beings. Our societal conditioning blinds us to the horror of suffering experienced by non-human animals through our cruel system of factory farming. This conversation looks at how facing and responding to this suffering is necessary for the freedom of our own hearts, and the healing of the world.

Resilience and Wisdom in an Uncertain World, a conversation between IMCW’s executive director, Trisha Stotler and Tara Brach. The Buddhist scriptures describe a mind that “no longer shakes, in a world where everything is shaking.” Our times are deeply stressful and troubling, and we need individual and collective ways of responding from our deepest understanding and care. In this interview, Tara reflects on the perspectives and ways of practicing that allow us to engage in relationships and our larger society from an awake compassionate heart.

The often unseen cause of our difficulties in relationships is the societal structures that are marked by violence and domination. This conversation looks at what blocks authentic and loving connectedness, and ways to intentionally cultivate authentic, openhearted awake relationships.

The principles of mindful leadership are relevant for all of us—they bring out the best of who we are in our work, with our family, with our friends. Especially in these times of mistrust and dividedness, our world desperately needs each of us to cultivate the qualities of focus, presence, care, respect, clarity, and curiosity that mark a true leader. Michelle Maldonado is a brilliant teacher of mindful leadership, and she embodies the compassion and skillfulness she invites forward in others.

In this interview-style conversation, Jonathan asks Tara questions about key themes in her new book, Trusting the Gold. They include their own relationships and ways we work with our inner life and others, in cultivating the capacity to see basic goodness and realizing a mature and liberating quality of trust.

Kristin Neff is a pioneer in self-compassion research and a leader in bringing practices of self-compassion alive in our world. This conversation is on her latest book, Fierce Self-Compassion, which helps women awaken both receptive and active dimensions of compassion – tenderness and fierceness.

Drawn from Tara’s new 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. Check www.tarabrach.com for more information on Tara’s new book, including pre-order links.

Bob Stahl, Richard Shankman, James Baraz, Thanissara, Bob Isaacson, Patti Breitman, WIll Tuttle, Jina Shah, Tara Brach, Konda Mason, Dawn Mauricio