A pervasive but often invisible source of suffering in our culture is self-aversion. We are a busy culture, and we move through our life feeling anxious and dissatisfied, but not fully conscious of how we neglect or judge our inner experience. We suffer from a lack of belonging: to our own bodies, to each other and to the earth. When we practice Buddhist meditation, we learn how to listen deeply and hold our life tenderly.
The open space of compassion allows us to realize that our thoughts and emotions are not who we are; they are waves in our ocean. This gives us the freedom to live more wisely and love more fully.
For over thirty-five years, I've been exploring the awakening of awareness with yoga, meditation, a clinical psychology practice and relationships in spiritual community (sangha). Since the untying of emotional knots is an essential part of "waking up," it is natural for me to weave these elements into my Buddhist practice and teaching. With formal practice, and a genuine engagement in sangha, we can cultivate the qualities of heart and awareness that allow for deep emotional healing and spiritual freedom.
Buddhism guides us in slowing down, quieting and paying attention in an honest and caring way. Through our mindfulness and compassion practices, we establish a sense of intimacy and belonging to our life. We discover that there is no Buddha "out there." Rather, we realize that our true refuge is the wakefulness, openness and love of our own natural awareness.
This talk looks at the power our virtual reality of thoughts can hold over our lives. We then explore how bringing mindful awareness to thinking enables us to heal historical wounding and discover who we are beyond the self-story in our mind. We don’t have to believe our thoughts - they are "real but not true!"
In Buddhism and most faiths, humility - feeling that we all share common ground, feeling neither superior or inferior to others - is both a prerequisite to awakening and an expression of mature spirituality. This talk explores how our conditioning and culture reinforce a swing from ego-inflation (self-importance, feeling special, better than others) to ego-deflation (feeling unworthy). We then look at how a wise and kind attention opens us to who we are beyond these confining egoic states, and enables us to live with humility and grace.
Bodhisattva means “Awakened Being.” This path of awakening has three key domains for practice: remembering intention; training our attention; and compassionate activity. This talk reviews these domains and includes guided reflections that can help bring spirituality alive in daily life.
Tara explores a range of questions that include working with unworthiness, recognizing aspiration, stepping out of the story and understanding the selfless quality of experience.
As we cultivate mindfulness we become increasingly aware of how we move through huge swaths of our life in trance. This talk reflects on three key domains of trance, and undoing the habitual reactivity that keeps us from the loving, open awareness that is our essence.
Drawing on Henri Nouwen’s book that interprets this famous parable, this talk looks at the ways we cut off from loving awareness, and the process of homecoming. Our inquiry, reflections and a guided meditation focus on an essential and often overlooked element of transformation: our capacity to trust in love, to let love in.
How do we reconcile conflict when caught in reactivity sourced in trauma or deep wounding? This talk looks at the need for a larger field of belonging - a trusted other person or safe group - to engender the presence and compassion that enables us to relax and reconnect with our own wholeness and with others.
As long as we are identified as separate selves, we will inevitably experience conflict with others. If we learn to release blame and deepen attention to our embodied experience, conflict can become a portal for more loving, alive relationships and awakening into the fullness of our being.
The acronym RAIN is a powerful tool for interrupting habitual patterns of emotional reactivity and discovering the freedom of an awake, compassionate presence. This talk explores the components of RAIN, how it works, what makes it transformational and typical challenges people encounter. The teachings include a guided RAIN meditation.
The way that we relate to impermanence and loss shapes our capacity to live and love fully. This talk, drawing on Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods,” explores three elements in our response to this fleeting, precious life that are integral to our healing and freedom.
The universal experience of stress (in Buddhism, called dukkha) is a message that we are not realizing, trusting and living from our true nature. Our habitual reactions to stress - grasping, aversion, resistance - deepen emotional pain and lock us in a limiting sense of egoic-self. This talk explores how, with conscious intention and deepened attention, the stressful difficulties we encounter can become the very grounds of healing and spiritual awakening.
When we are lost in the trance of thinking, we disconnect from the aliveness, awareness and love that is our source. Mindfulness, a key capacity of our evolving consciousness, awakens us from an identification with thinking and enables us to inhabit a wider realm of Being. This talk explores the confines of conceptual mind and the simple yet powerful practices that cultivate mindful awareness.
Drawing on Henri Nouwen’s book that interprets this famous parable, this talk looks at the ways we cut off from loving awareness, and the process of homecoming. Our inquiry, reflections and a guided meditation focus on an essential and often overlooked element of transformation: our capacity to trust in love, to let love in.
Equanimity is the quality of presence that is open, balanced and non-reactive. As this talk explores, when equanimity is lacking, we become easily lost in trance, identified as a defended and controlling egoic self. When present, the solidity and constriction of egoic self dissolves, and our heart is free to respond to life with love, compassion, forgiveness and joy.
Our innate capacity for joy is blocked by our habitual ways of paying attention. This talk explores three key pathways of presence that connect us with our full openness and aliveness.
Anger is an intelligent emotion, a natural part of our evolutionary design that lets us know when we are endangered or impeded in our progress. But when it locks into ongoing resentment and blame, our heart becomes armored and we lose access to a wholeness of being. This talk explores forgiving as a process of relaxing our armoring and awakening a healing compassion for ourselves and others.
Most of us consciously value compassion, but move through much of life without access to the full capacity of our heart. This talk explores the self-compassion that is the very grounds of loving our world.
This talk explores stress-related emotional suffering and how mindfulness and compassion practices can serve our children’s natural intelligence, creativity and openheartedness. Trainings in presence are the hope for this next generation, and the healing of our world.
CULTIVATING RESILIENCE: MINDFULNESS TRAINING FOR STUDENTS ~
How mindfulness training can benefit students and the adults who nurture them An evening with Tara Brach and Congressman Tim Ryan at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD. Talk given on 2013/10/07.
Lovingkindness, or metta, is the first of the four divine abodes in buddhist teachings. This talk explores the habitual patterns of fears and wants that obscure this innate quality of heart and key ways that we awaken ourselves to its luminous presence.
Listening with our full heart and attention is the gateway to understanding and love. This talk explores the challenges to deep listening, and offers ways of paying attention that awaken a healing listening presence.
This talk explores the three archetypal gateways to liberation - awareness (Buddha), truth (Dharma) and love (Sangha). It includes guided reflections and a refuge ceremony that can help us discover the path “inside out” through daily life.
It is our evolutionary and spiritual potential to release unnecessary habits of violating other tribes, individuals and unwanted parts of our own being. This talk explores three essential facets of the pathway to awakening: Leaving the fortress of aversive judgment, entering the wilderness of our embodied being and encircling this life with love.
This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence - in relating inwardly and in communicating with others - that awakens and frees our hearts.
At end of talk - La Sarmiento shares "Holiday Dharma" as part of Solstice celebration.
This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence—in relating inwardly and in communicating with others—that awakens and frees our hearts.
Wisdom is an innate capacity, but often covered over by trance. This talk explores how we abandon ourselves as we busily seek ways to feel more worthy, loveable and safe. We then look at the pathway home, the radical non-doing and space of silence that allows wisdom and love to flow through.
We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this unlived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization. These talks explore the ways that we defend ourselves, and the pathway to gently, wisely and intelligently disarming and freeing our hearts.
We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this unlived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization. These talks explore the ways that we defend ourselves, and the pathway to gently, wisely and intelligently disarming and freeing our hearts.
Siddhartha Gautama’s last challenge before enlightenment was doubt, and to some degree, most of us live with limiting beliefs about our own worthiness and goodness. This talk looks at the tenacity of self-doubt and the power of mindfulness, investigation and compassion in releasing its grip.
Part of incarnating is to feel separate and forget the mysterious oneness that is our home. This talk explores the two dimensions of awareness that when awakened reveal the openness, lucidity and love that expresses our true nature.
(retreat talk) - By dedicating ourselves to loving the life that is right here--ourselves--we discover the heartspace that holds this world. This talk explores the pathways of forgiveness, offering and letting in love, and gratitude that reveal the vastness of loving presence.
This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through.
This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through.
What will it take to have us collectively awaken to the suffering of our earth and respond? This talk looks at how we are destroying our larger body, the earth; what stops us from recognizing and opening to the suffering of loss, and ways we can evolve our consciousness and act on behalf of this precious life.
On all spiritual paths, we journey into the inner wilderness to discover the nature of nature - the truth of who we are. The entry is through bringing a kind and full presence to the life of our bodies. These two talks explore the conditioning that leads us to dissociation, and the blessings of full aliveness, open heartedness and wisdom that arise when we come home to embodied presence.
On all spiritual paths, we journey into the inner wilderness to discover the nature of nature - the truth of who we are. The entry is through bringing a kind and full presence to the life of our bodies. These two talks explore the conditioning that leads us to dissociation, and the blessings of full aliveness, open heartedness and wisdom that arise when we come home to embodied presence.
The hope for inner and world peace lies in our evolutionary capacity to shift from Fight-Flight-Freeze reactivity to responding to aggravation with Attend-Befriend. This talk explores the three elements on this path of awakening that support us in this transformation: Remembering our true aspiration; taking full responsibility (for whatever arises in our experience) and widening the circles of our caring to include all beings.
When we are caught in the sense of separation and unmet needs, our love is marbled with fear and attachment. This talk describes the chain of conditioning that perpetuates the constrictions of egoic love and explores several courageous activities--sharing our vulnerability, expressing love, extending and receiving love-- that awaken us to the vastness and freedom of pure loving awareness.
Whenever Mara--the shadow side--appeared during the Buddha's life, his response was simple and liberating: "I see you Mara," and,"Please, come…let's have tea." In that spirit, this talk explores three approaches to relating to fear with a mindful and compassionate presence.
The flute meditation at the end of the talk is given by Akal Dev.
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Our relationship to fear shapes our life experience. If we are unconscious, and reflexively try to manage fear, our identity takes the shape of the body of fear. If instead we learn to attend and befriend fear, we discover the freedom of our awakened heart.
We all have a longing to belong. When pursued at the egoic level--often through our good-personhood projects--there may be temporary satisfaction but our sense of separation is ultimately reinforced. In contrast, bringing mindfulness and compassion to whatever is arising dissolves the sense of separation and reveals the basic goodness of our own loving presence.
La primera sesión define la meditación y describe las enseñanzas budistas que le dan contexto al camino de la practica. Exploramos las dos formas básicas de meditación - concentración y conciencia plena - y luego nos enfocamos en el entrenamiento de conciencia plena: trayendo atención de conciencia plena a la respiración y sensaciones corporales. Las meditaciones guiadas incluyen el establecimiento de una intención y la pausa sagrada; aprendiendo a "regresar" usando la respiración como un ancla; y "estando aquí" con una presencia encarnada.
If we inquire "what is between me and presence" we usually find we've been caught inside a limiting story of self, contracted by wants and fears. This talk explores a simple yet powerful way of arousing loving presence and dissolving the narrow identification that keeps us from inhabiting our awakened heartmind.
This talk addresses common misunderstandings about acceptance (allowing, "letting be") and explores the challenges and blessings of opening to the raw emotions that we habitually avoid.
In this talk we further define the nature of mature or spiritual hope as part of a trinity that includes trust and love, and explore what blocks its unfolding. We then review how different people have "hit bottom" and found their way to the energy, receptivity and openness of hope.
This talk looks at the difference between egoic hopes and fears, and the quality of hopefulness ("holy hope") that is an essential dimension in spiritual experience. We reflect on the three components of hope that serve awakening: Aspiration, Trust and Dedication of energy.
When we are stressed, our way of relating to each other is ego to ego. This talk explores the understandings and practices that enable us to embody "nameste": Honoring the sacred that lives through all beings.
The depth and vitality of a meditation practice depends on our sincerity, and an attitude of curiosity and friendliness. With this as the grounds, our practice will cultivate the clear seeing and openheartedness that expresses our deepest nature. This talk covers basic ingredients in a meditation practice, and includes a half hour of questions and responses.
We have strong conditioning to relate to each other from a sense of separateness--persona to persona. This talk looks at what traps us in egoic relating and how several simple yet powerful reflections can open us to pure, unconditioned loving.
We long for love and habitually armor our hearts. This talk explores the aggression and clinging that protect our wound of feeling unlovable, and the ways that mindfulness can dissolve our defenses and reveal our inner refuge of pure loving presence.
Our fear-based doings block us from realizing the formless dimension of our Being, and living from that source of wisdom and love. This talk explores the habitual control strategies that keep us from presence; and the role of mindfulness and lovingkindness in reconnecting with the ground of Being.
The greatest truths we forget, and one of them is that if we don't love the life that is right here--what we perceive as self--we are unable to embrace our world. This talk explores the suffering of turning on ourselves and the deep freedom that arises when we commit to relating to our inner life with loving presence.
Our capacity to live and love fully is directly related to our acceptance of change and loss. This talk explores how we avoid the pain of loss, ways of practicing that open us to this changing world, and the gifts of letting go into the flow.
John O'Donahue writes, "We are so busy managing our lives, we forget this great mystery we are involved in." This talk looks at the ways we pull away from the mystery and the path of "beginners mind" that enables us to encounter this living world with freshness, courage and wonder.
The third gift on the journey of awakening is the mirror. In this talk we explore how to look back into our own minds and discover the timeless, radiant presence that is our essence. It is this realization of our Beingness that enables us to live these lives with wisdom, love and wonder.
Each of us has the longing to manifest our full potential--to realize and live from loving, awake awareness. This longing is our inner fire, and when conscious and vibrant, it energizes the spiritual path. In this talk we reflect on how fear obscures and redirects our inner fire, and how practices of presence and wise reflection awaken the power and purity of our longing.
We can only find love and peace in this life if we are able to hold our inner life with compassion. This talk explores the subtle and therefore often unseen ways that we turn on ourselves, and the pathways to a forgiving heart.
Part 1: In this two part series we explore the evolution of consciousness through the lens of three key capacities: A forgiving heart, inner fire (conscious aspiration toward freedom) and self-inquiry.
We all encounter the great losses of our own health and life, and of cherished others. We are conditioned to resist opening to the rawness and grief that comes with loss. This talk describes the refuge of presence in the face of loss, and the gift of timeless love that arises as we make peace with the reality of this living, dying world. [NOTE: Tara was traveling this week, so offering a well-loved talk from 2010.]
Hildegard of Bingen writes, "An interpreted world is not a Home." This talk explores the suffering that arises from believing in an interpreted reality, and the love, aliveness and freedom that becomes accessible as we challenge beliefs and awaken into living presence.
No matter what is happening in our lives, if we relate to our experience with mindful recognition and an allowing presence, it becomes a portal to freedom. In this talk we explore how the cultivation of these wings of presence awakens us from the identification with an egoic self, and reveals the awareness and love that is our true nature.
This talk traces the story of the Buddha's awakening, and reflects on four key archetypal elements that are relevant for each of us as we come home to our true nature. There is a particular emphasis on how these elements enable us to encounter challenges in relationships and find our way to openhearted presence.
Includes music honoring the launch of Tara's new book, True Refuge: vocal by La Sarmiento and Guru Ganesha with his Kirtan band.
Our conscious aspiration toward awakening is what energizes the spiritual path. This talk reviews the main characteristic of a vital aspiration, the conditioning that obscures our deepest intentions and offers guided reflections to connect us with what most matters.
When we forget who we are, we are living in a trance that is characterized by suffering. This talk explores the genesis of this trance, and the transformation that is possible as we bring forgiveness and mindful presence to the afflictive emotions that naturally arise.
If we are suffering it is because we are believing something that is not true. This talk explores the genesis of our core beliefs and the investigation, mindfulness and compassion that can release their grip.
You might reflect on someone important to you, and ask: "What is between me and loving fully?" Notice what happens. This talk explores the ways we create separations from others, and the power of inquiry and presence to awaken an unconditionally loving heart.
This talk explores the three classic gateways to peace and freedom and includes a living ritual that invites us to bring a conscious, sincere dedication to our awakening on the spiritual path.
Our suffering arises from unlived life--the fears and loneliness and hurt that we have been unable to digest and include in our heart. This talk explores our conditioning to become dis-embodied and the blessings of spiritual realization that arise as we inhabit our aliveness fully.
This solstice talk explores how, in the face of darkness - unconsciousness, ignorance, violence - we can call on the light that is within us. The two pathways are to courageously look directly into the places of suffering, and to include in our gaze, the intrinsic goodness in all beings, in life.
Living with chronic blame or resentment is a trance that confines us to a limited fragment of what we are. This talk looks at the ways this trance is fueled and the process by which we release the armoring around our hearts.
Self-aggression, whether it's low key blame or deep condemnation, prevents us from intimacy with others and discovering the truth and wholeness of our Being. This talk explores how we can release self-blame, and free ourselves to access our natural warmth and creativity in responding to our world.
Those who are genuinely happy, are also naturally grateful for life and generous in living. This Thanksgiving Eve talk explores key ways we block the arising of gratitude and generosity, and practices of mindful presence and direct cultivation that awaken these expressions of the liberated heart.
We are deeply conditioned to respond to impermanence and inevitable loss by trying to control our experience. Our egoic reactivity prevents us from responding wisely to our life, and living the moments fully. This talk looks at how we can let go of controlling, open to the groundlessness we run from, and reconnect with the deep intelligence and love that flows through our being.
When we are caught in a stress reaction, we are in a trance that cuts us off from our creativity, full intelligence and capacity to be loving. This talk explores the flags of the stress-trance and three meditative strategies for shifting from fight/flight to attend/befriend. (at end is a cut from "Love the One You're With" by Steven Stills)
