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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.
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2024-01-10 Meditation: Awakening Our Full Aliveness 20:22
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We cut off from our aliveness when we are lost in thoughts and on auto pilot. This meditation arouses a receptivity to sensation from “the inside out,” opens the awareness to sound, and then invites a full resting in receptive, dynamic presence (from the archives). It doesn’t matter how many times the mind drifts. It’s the gentle re-arriving that retrains your heart and mind. Just to choose to come back… Perhaps to sense what might let go a little more… If there’s something that might want to relax a bit more right now… To listen to and feel the changing moment-to-moment experience with an awake, open awareness. ~ Tara
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2024-01-10 How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 1 45:53
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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 (a special favorite from the archives).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2024-01-03 Meditation: Energy and Source 19:10
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Our incessant thinking removes us from the full aliveness, vastness and mystery of Being. This guided practice helps us inhabit our energetic forms, and rest in the vast, formless stillness that gives rise to this ever creative living world.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2024-01-03 Coming Home to True Refuge 59:31
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While we habitually try to control our life, our true refuge—the source of peace, safety and freedom—is in the direct realization of reality itself. This talk explores three archetypal portals to true refuge—awareness (buddha), truth (dharma) and love (sangha.) With each we practice short reflections that help bring the particular gateway to refuge alive.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-27 Meditation: Opening to the Mystery 16:46
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This guided meditation includes a body scan and invites the receptivity and letting-go of whole body breathing. Once we have awakened the vitality and presence throughout the body, we have access to the formless dimension, the awareness that is our source. The meditation closes with “Walk Slowly”, from the poetry of Danna Faulds.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-27 The Sacred Pause 54:54
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When we are lost in the trance of doing, our lives are on automatic, and contracted by sense that something’s wrong or missing. This talk explores the challenges of learning to pause, and the blessings that arise when we step out of our incessant mental and physical activity and reconnect with the being-qualities of presence, wisdom and love (a favorite from the archives). “The deepest expression of love is this non-doing presence because that’s when we are inhabiting who we really are.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-20 Meditation: Relaxed and Awake 16:58
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This guided meditation helps us find ease and wakefulness in our body and mind. With the breath as our home base, we offer a gentle and full attention to the changing waves. We close with a beautiful poem, “Walk Slowly,” by Danna Faulds.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-20 Finding True Belonging in the Midst of Stress 53:33
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Our deepest longing is to feel our belonging to each other and all life. This reflection examines the primary forces that keep us trapped in a trance of separation. We then explore two powerful dimensions of spiritual practice that can undo trance and reveal the sentience and love that is our shared essence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-13 Guided Meditation: Opening to the Sea of Presence 20:06
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When our body and mind is relaxed, we become filled with a very awake, dynamic quality of presence. This meditation guides us in relaxing, opening our senses and resting in the vastness and inherent freedom of our own natural awareness.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-13 Awakening from Trance – Embracing Unlived Life 51:35
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When physical or emotional pain is too much, our conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings. The result is a trance – we are split off from the wholeness of our aliveness, intelligence and capacity to love. This talk explores how this dissociation shows up in our lives and how mindfulness enables us to integrate cut-off parts of our being in a powerful way, and awaken from this trance.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-06 Meditation: Whole Body Breathing 17:22
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This guided meditation includes a body scan and invites the receptivity and letting-go of whole body breathing. Once we have awakened the vitality and presence throughout the body, we have access to the formless dimension, the awareness that is our source.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-12-06 Basic Goodness and Awe: A conversation between Tara Brach and Dacher Keltner 60:31
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Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a scientist and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has authored a number of books, including bestselling “Born to be Good” and most recently “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life”. Our conversation covers the biological, evolutionary and cultural bases of human goodness and the centrality of awe in the human experience. We explore the blocks to experiencing our full potential, and ways we can cultivate our innate capacity for finding wonder, love, creativity and beauty in our daily lives. Learn more about Dacher’s latest book at: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622175/awe-by-dacher-keltner/
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-29 Meditation: Breathing Our Way to Peace & Freedom 19:01
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This meditation guides us in collecting attention with an intentional long deep breath, and awakening a full relaxed presence as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm. Resting fully in this presence is the gateway to deep peace and inner freedom. “Little breath breathe me gently, row me, for I am the river I am learning to cross.” – W.S. Merwin
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-29 How Do We Bridge the Divides? 45:33
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The divides in our world can only exist if we humans are divided from our own full being and habituated to divides with others. In this reflection we explore bridging inner and relational divides as the grounds for evolving consciousness in our species and awakening to more connectedness and love in our world.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-22 Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness 19:53
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This meditation begins by guiding us through a scan: opening to inner space and aliveness, then to outer space, and then continuous space, filled with the light of awareness. We explore how every experience belongs to this infinite awake space of our Being, and can be held with tenderness and love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-22 A Generous Heart 55:07
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Our deep potential is to live from an awake, loving heart. This talk looks at how, with a kind and mindful attention, we can decondition habitual tendencies toward grasping and self-centeredness, and nourish the sense of connectedness and care that gives rise to generosity. As we bring these heart practices alive in our most immediate relationships, they have the power to evolve consciousness in widening circles across the world.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-15 Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence 13:10
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Our thoughts keep us removed from this living world. This guided practice invites us to open and relax with the moment-to-moment experience of our senses. It includes a poem by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, “Wherever you are, Find a Trail.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-15 Becoming Happier: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Arthur Brooks 1:18:52
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The Dalai Lama regularly says that everyone wants to be happy, nobody wants to suffer. Arthur Brooks, in his new book on getting happier (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey) digs into the practical and science-based approaches that increase deep wellbeing. In this conversation Tara and Arthur discuss the ingredients of happiness, the role of unhappiness in our lives, how to work with core ego-fears, the power of metacognition, the necessity of transcendence of small self and the love that is the grounds of true happiness. Learn more about Arthur’s work & pick up a copy of his new book, Build the Life You Want at: https://arthurbrooks.com.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-08 Meditation: Relaxing Back and Saying Yes to the Moment 18:49
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When we are stressed, our conditioning is to tighten our body. We tense against our moment-to-moment experience. This meditation is a powerful practice of de-conditioning this reactivity by learning to relax back into presence, and to respond to difficulty by saying “yes.” Through relaxing back and saying “yes,” we discover our heart’s capacity for unconditional love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-08 The Wise Heart of Radical Acceptance 68:26
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When we are caught in self-judgment we forget the truth of who we are – our wholeness, awareness and love. This talk examines how we take the imperfect waves of our being personally, and become imprisoned in the trance of unworthiness, a limited and distorted reality. We then look at how the practice of Radical Acceptance enables us to come home to a fullness of being, and live from a growing sense of loving connectedness with all beings.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-01 Mindful Glimpses: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Loch Kelly 1:12:24
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with Loch Kelly, Tara Brach
Loch Kelly is an author, psychotherapist and highly respected meditation teacher known for his instructions for effortless mindfulness. Our rich and wide-ranging conversation includes themes of interconnectedness, the natural weaves of psychology and meditation, the healing of self-compassion, the power of short glimpses into the nature of reality, RAIN, prayer, awakening through social identities, turning toward dying, centering joy and much more! Loch Kelly is the creator of the new groundbreaking Meditation and Wellness App, Mindful Glimpses. This new app seamlessly weaves together ancient wisdom, cutting-edge psychology, and neuroscience research. Drawing from over 40 years of mindfulness teaching and psychotherapy practice, Loch Kelly has crafted an app that provides simple yet advanced micro-meditations to return you to home base anytime of the day.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-11-01 Guided Meditation: The Sea of Awareness 15:33
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Our attention habitually fixates on the foreground of thoughts and feelings, and fuels an unconscious identification with a sense of separate self. This meditation guides us in recognizing the awareness that is the background and source of all experience. By resting in and as the awareness that we are, all sense of separation dissolves revealing the vastness and oneness of Being.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-25 Meditation: Awake and Alive 18:04
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This guided practice includes a body scan, and an opening to the awareness that includes all of life. From that wakeful openness we offer a relaxed attentiveness to the changing flow, and close with loving kindness to ourselves and our world. …calling on the presence of your heart and offering whatever blessing or wish you’d like to offer to yourself… whatever prayer of care. Then in that heart-space including other beings in this world. Holding the world in your heart and sensing your prayer of care for all beings. ~ Tara (from the meditation)
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-25 What is our Refuge in the Midst of Crisis? A Conversation with Tara and Stephen Fulder 55:23
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with Stephen Fulder, Tara Brach
Stephen Fulder is a senior Buddhist teacher, author and peace activist who lives and teaches in Israel. In this conversation Stephen shares about his experience during the unfolding violence in the Middle East, and what he and his community are doing to tend to the huge trauma people are feeling. He talks about being with intense fear and emotions, and how to talk with those who have very different views. And he shares about the past decades of the deep and powerful work he’s been involved in, bringing groups of Israeli and Palestinian people together to find their shared hearts and humanity. Together Stephen and Tara look at what our true refuge is in the midst of a world in crisis and pathways that can carry us to that precious space of equanimity, compassion and love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-18 Meditation: Relaxing with Life 23:00
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This meditation includes a mindful body scan and guidance in relaxing with the changing waves of experience. When we say “Yes” to the moment, we open to the sea of awareness that can include, with care, whatever arises.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-18 Four Spiritual Inquiries: Finding Heart Wisdom in Painful Times 51:34
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When we get stuck in difficult emotions like hatred, anger and fear, we are in a trance of separation – disconnected from the whole of our inner experience, each other and the web of life. This talk explores four inquiries that help us reconnect with presence and heart. Rather than reacting with aggression or blame, these inquiries allow us to respond to our struggling world with our naturally wise and caring heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-11 Meditation: Living Presence – with Body Scan 12:05
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A key pathway to full presence is awakening through the body. This meditation guides us through a body scan, relaxing and receiving the play of sensations. We then deepen attention to the breath, and rest with the rhythmic waves of breathing, experiencing the background of the whole domain of physical aliveness.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-11 Radical Self-Forgiving 57:54
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When we can’t forgive ourselves, we remain imprisoned and separate from our world. This talk explores forgiving as a process of relaxing open the clenched fist of self-blame. As forgiving becomes deep and full, we discover the freedom of a spacious, awake and loving heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-04 Meditation: Letting Thought Clouds Come and Go 21:56
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This meditation guides us through a body scan and into a relaxed, open presence. When we realize we are lost in a thought cloud, our practice is to relax open, listening to and feeling the life of the present moment. We are training to become increasingly aware of the gap between thoughts, the space where the light of awareness shines through. “It’s in that gap between thoughts that the light shines through – this mystery, this living mystery of what’s right here… opening to and relaxing into the life that’s right here.” ~ Tara
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-10-04 Longing for Freedom: A Conversation with Tara Brach and Lama Rod Owens 62:23
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In his recent book, The New Saints, Lama Rod Owens offers teachings and practices that awaken our longing for freedom, and help us realize the truth of who we are. This week, I sat down with Lama Rod to talk about how an authentic path of liberation must include the often unexamined layers of our personal and societal existence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-27 Meditation: Continuous Space Suffused with Awareness 19:06
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By learning to inhabit the body, we discover the space and aliveness that fills the universe. In this meditation we are guided through the body, filling different domains with presence. We then open into the continuous awake space that is both within and surrounds the body. When we notice the mind drifts, we relax back to be that awake space, aware of the changing flow of sensations, thoughts, feelings and sounds.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-27 Awakening from the Trance of Self-Centeredness 53:56
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At the core of our suffering is our universal human predicament: an illusion that we are a separate self. This talk explores how this identification as a self obscures our belonging to loving awareness, and offers a powerful set of practices that shine a light on self-centeredness and relaxes its grip.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-20 Meditation: Opening to the Flow 23:30
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This meditation begins with gathering awareness of the breath. We then reflect on our deepest intention, sensing what most matters. With a listening attention, becoming aware of sounds that arise and pass away. We scan through the body, sensing the changing experience of energy and aliveness. Letting everything happen… not opposing anything… not controlling… moment to moment. Listening to and feeling this moment as an ever-changing river of experience. Opening to this changing flow and letting life flow through us.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-20 Saying Yes: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield (Part 2) 32:23
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In this rich and full two-part interview, Tara speaks with renowned poet Jane Hirshfield about the interface between poetry and meditation, the centrality of acceptance, and the pathways of remembrance that reveal our belonging to this world and open us to caring. Here’s a link to Jane’s most recent book: The Asking: New and Selected Poems. The interview includes readings from this beautiful collection.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-13 Meditation: Everything Belongs 20:08
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This guided meditation awakens an embodied presence through a body scan, and invites us to rest in the breath, while allowing the different waves of sensations, feelings and sounds to come and go. When difficult experiences arise, we breathe with them, feeling them fully and mentally whispering, “this belongs,” or “this too.” By not resisting, we discover the sea of awareness that has room for all the waves.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-13 Saying Yes: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Jane Hirshfield (Part 1) 40:38
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In this rich and full two-part interview, Tara speaks with renowned poet Jane Hirshfield about the interface between poetry and meditation, the centrality of acceptance, and the pathways of remembrance that reveal our belonging to this world and open us to caring. Here’s a link to Jane’s most recent book: The Asking: New and Selected Poems. The interview includes readings from this beautiful collection.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-06 Meditation: At Home in the Moment 19:29
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This meditation cultivates a gentle, wakeful presence in the body, with the “smile down” and then guides us to resting in a home base of sensations or the breath. We then open to whatever arises with a clear and inclusive attention, saying “Yes” to the life that is here.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-09-06 Path of Sacred Relatedness – Undoing the Blocks to Loving Presence 52:37
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We long for soul friends, and yet often engage with each other in reactive ways – caught inside the experience of a wanting, guarded, fearful self. This talk explores practices that release identification with these scales that confine us, so we can remember the sacredness living through ourselves and all beings.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-30 Meditation: Vipassana – The Practice of Seeing Clearly 18:08
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Vipassana, also known as insight meditation, is training in bringing a clear mindful attention to our moment to moment experience. We begin by relaxing through the body and then resting attention with the breath – or some other sensory anchor – and allowing the mind to settle. Then we open to whatever is predominant or calling our attention – sensations, emotions, sounds – meeting each arising experience with a clear, kind attention. The gift of this process is discovering balance in the midst of the changing flow, and gaining deep insight into the nature of reality.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-30 The Honesty Challenge – Getting More Truthful with Ourselves and Our World 50:24
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Most of us value honesty yet are not aware of how regularly we avoid facing what’s difficult inside us, and how we are less than truthful with others. This talk explores the practice of radical self-honesty as the grounds of being more honest with others, and bringing more love and freedom to our lives. We close with a quote by Danna Faulds from her book:
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-23 Meditation: Being a Kind Witness 18:01
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Learning to witness what is going on inside us is the gateway to inner freedom and deep realization. This meditation guides us in witnessing our experience with a non-judging and kind awareness. “A witnessing awareness is like a kind grandmother watching children – that simply notices what’s happening without judgment.” ~Tara
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-23 The Superpower of Mindful Witnessing 42:51
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The capacity to witness what is happening inside us with a non-judging attention allows us to respond to life from our full intelligence and heart. This talk looks at the role of witnessing in spiritual practice, and how we can cultivate this superpower in a way that reveals the light or spirit that lives through all beings.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-16 Meditation: Openhearted Presence 19:26
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This meditation guides us to arouse mindfulness through attention to our senses, and to rest in that wakefulness with a receptive and tender presence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-16 Conscious Prayer – Finding Refuge in Loving Awareness (retreat talk) 66:20
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Prayer is a communing with our enlarged being. This talk examines less conscious forms of prayer, and how we can evolve the power of our prayers by opening into the depth of our longing, and reaching toward our true belonging (from the 2016 IMCW Spring Silent Retreat).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-09 Meditation: Relaxing Back into the Mystery 18:10
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All true meditation guides us back to presence, and the mystery that is our source. In this guided meditation we awaken the senses, collect with the breath, and when lost in thought, practice relaxing back into the aliveness and awareness that is always here. We close with a beautiful poem from poet Danna Faulds.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-09 Part 2: Rewiring for Happiness and Freedom 52:52
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The Buddha said, “I would not be teaching this (a path of awakening) if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible.” While this is our potential, we each have deep conditioning to get stuck in feelings of fear, deficiency and separation from others. These talks explore the two interdependent pathways of undoing the conditioning that blocks our potential. In Part I we will look at how we can intentionally arouse states of well-being, and with practice, develop them into ongoing traits that bring presence and joy to our lives. In Part II, we will investigate how to cultivate an unconditional presence, and the radical acceptance and love, that are the grounds of true happiness and inner freedom.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-02 Meditation: Coming Home with the Breath 14:56
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Our breath is always available as a pathway back to presence. This simple meditation guides us to relax and awaken in the body, and then establishes the breath as a home base for our attention. Our practice is to notice when the mind becomes distracted, and gently return to our breath and senses. This helps the mind to become increasingly settled, calm and clear. We close with a short heart blessing. “As you let your attention go inward, you might ask yourself a very simple question: What is most important to me? What is it that brings me to practice right now? What does your heart long for?"
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-08-02 Part 1: Rewiring for Happiness and Freedom 52:55
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The Buddha said, “I would not be teaching this (a path of awakening) if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible.” While this is our potential, we each have deep conditioning to get stuck in feelings of fear, deficiency and separation from others. These talks explore the two interdependent pathways of undoing the conditioning that blocks our potential. In Part I we will look at how we can intentionally arouse states of wellbeing, and with practice, develop them into ongoing traits that bring presence and joy to our lives. In Part II, we will investigate how to cultivate an unconditional presence, and the radical acceptance and love, that are the grounds of true happiness and inner freedom.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-26 Guided Meditation: Intimacy with the Flow of Life 20:08
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The meditation begins with a body scan, filling the body with aliveness. Then we widen attention, becoming aware of the sounds that are happening moment-to-moment, aware of the sensations, feelings, or emotions that are here. Again and again, the invitation is to relax back into presence, intimate with the life living through you. In allowing life to be just as it is, we inhabit pure Beingness, at home in the dynamic and tender awareness that is our shared essence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-26 Intimacy with Life (Part 2) 61:30
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Zen master Dōgen teaches that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. These two talks explore teachings and practices that cultivate intimacy – a liberating experience of relatedness and oneness with our living world.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC

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