Donate  |   Contact


The greatest gift is the
gift of the teachings
 
Tara Brach's Dharma Talks
Tara Brach
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.
2023-05-10 Meditation: Receiving This Life in Awareness 22:27
In our everyday life we are conditioned to feel that life is happening to us, or that we are the doer. This meditation de-conditions that self-centrality by bringing attention to the aliveness in our bodies, and then opening to receive the entire play of sounds, sensations and feelings in awareness.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-10 Releasing the Habits That Imprison Your Spirit – Part 1 50:52
Addictions of all levels of intensity arise from disconnection and are spiking globally. Humans are experiencing epidemic levels of loneliness, and this combined with engineered products and substances that are highly addictive leads to great suffering. In these two talks, we explore how we get hooked on behaviors that we know cause harm, and how mindfulness and self-compassion can serve our freedom. Key to this process is reconnecting with our inner life, and remembering we are in this together, awakening together.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-03 Meditation: Embodying Acceptance and Care 15:53
This guided meditation helps us cultivate a friendly relationship with our experience. Using the image of a smile, we bring a gentle presence alive in our bodies, and then open to the heartspace that includes all facets of life. The meditation closes with a verse from poet, Dorothy Hunt, “Peace is this Moment Without Judgment.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-03 Radical Acceptance – Gateway to Love, Wisdom and Peace 51:46
Acceptance is radical because it undoes our resistance to reality. This talk explores how our meditation practice can cultivate a liberating acceptance, a heartspace that includes all of life and enables us to respond to our world with deep intelligence and compassion.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-26 Meditation: Embodied Spirit 16:54
Experiencing our aliveness through our senses is the gateway to resting in formless loving presence. This meditation guides us to awakening through our body, and recognizing the backdrop of silence, of awake awareness, that is the source of all being.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-26 Cultivating Loving Kindness – Seeing the Goodness 56:51
The ground of loving kindness is seeing the basic goodness in ourselves, each other and our world. This is what gives rise to pure appreciation, friendliness, love and the felt-sense of belonging. In this talk we explore what obscures and contracts our perceptual field, and the pathway of purposefully awakening this transformational capacity of cherishing all life.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-19 Meditation: Befriending Fear with RAIN (15 min.) 19:54
When we have the courage to pause and meet fear with the mindfulness and compassion of RAIN, our awareness and wisdom awaken. This RAIN meditation will guide you in unhooking from anxiety and fear, offering a pathway to inner transformation and a fearless heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC Intimacy with Life: Deepening the Practice of Presence | Spring 2023
2023-04-19 Realizing True Nature: A conversation with A.H. Almaas and Tara Brach 1:16:59
A.H. Almaas is an author, spiritual teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. In this interview we explore ways of approaching awakening to who we are, and look at the importance of befriending the experience of separate self, and actively investigating the blocks – our contracted sense of identity – that obscure the goodness and love of our true nature. Our time weaves in the inspiration of his most recent book, Nondual Love, (his pen name A.H. Almaas is listed as author.)
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-12 Meditation: Shining a Light on Limiting Beliefs with RAIN (12:18 min.) 19:45
The Buddha taught that if your mind is captured by the fear and misunderstanding of limiting beliefs, “trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.” In this brief guided meditation, we’ll use the RAIN practice (recognize-allow-investigate-nurture) to bring the light of awareness on the beliefs that may be blocking us from an open and free heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-12 Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World – Part 2 47:24
Last week, I began a two-part series inspired by Pema Chödron’s newest offering, How We Live is How We Die. It’s a powerful book that I highly recommend! One of our deepest inquiries is how to find happiness and peace in an inherently insecure world. In these talks, we’ll explore the ways we habitually try to control our lives, and the practices of presence that allow us to cherish this living world and find freedom in the midst of change and loss.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC

Creative Commons License