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…...

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—toge...

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).

Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Mus...

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 individua...

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 ...

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 controlli...

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 e...

What might change if you were three degrees friendlier than you are now? Not more accommodating or self-sacrificing, but authentically friendlier—to your inner life, with others, and in how you meet the world. In this talk, I explore what friendliness actually is, why it so often shuts down under stress, and how small, accessible practices can bring it back online—and, over time, uplevel your friendliness quoti...

This meditation establishes a gentle and caring presence through bringing the image and felt sense of a smile to various domains in the body. We then settle with the breath, and practice relaxing with whatever arises, letting life be just as it is. The underlying intention is to regard all experience with a clear, interested and friendly attention. The gift is a homecoming to our naturally loving presence.

This meditation awakens a receptive attention to the senses, starting with physical sensations and opening to sound. Then we sense how open awake awareness is receiving the moment to moment arising and passing life. In the final part of the practice, we explore how awake awareness is receiving the experience of our heart and offer blessings to our inner life and all living beings.

Our introduction music is from "Ope...

What if hope is not something we cling to—but a capacity we can cultivate?
In this talk, we'll explore how hope becomes a healing and liberating force when it is rooted in awareness, trust, and compassionate action. The mature expression of hope includes three interwoven elements: the aspiration to awaken our full potential, a trust in the possibility of that unfolding, and the energy to engage in service to life.

We'll also look a...

The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk, we explore the importance of hope on the spiritual path, its shadow side, and how we can nourish hope through these three elements in a way that serves inner freedom and the healing of our world. 

Our introduction mu...

In this talk, we'll  explore what it truly means to find refuge—not through controlling life, but by coming home to the living truth of our experience.

Our deepest refuge—the source of peace, safety, and freedom—is discovered through direct realization of reality itself. Drawing on the Buddhist understanding of refuge, we explore three timeless and archetypal gate...

In this guided meditation, Tara Brach invites you to step out of the trance of incessant thinking and return to the living presence of your body, breath, and awareness.

As we move through life identified with thought, we can lose touch with the aliveness, vastness, and mystery of Being. This practice offers a gentle pathway to inhabit your energetic form—sensing the vibrancy of life moving through you—while also resting in the boun...