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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.
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2023-07-19 Meditation: Relaxing Back into Presence 11:34
When we are stressed, our body and mind contract, and energetically we resist the life in the present moment. This meditation helps de-condition the stress reaction by guiding us to relax open from thoughts, relax physical tension, and gently relax back over and over into living presence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-19 Intimacy with Life (Part 1) 54:23
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
2023-07-12 Meditation: Present Heart 14:15
We awaken a present heart by relaxing with the breath, and bringing the kindness of a smile into our bodily experience. This meditation ends with an offering of blessings to our inner life and all beings.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-12 Being with Love, Death and Grief: Tara Brach and Frank Ostaseski 1:33:22
with Frank Ostaseski, Tara Brach
Grief is our natural way of expressing loss for what we love, and learning to open to grief serves the deepening and widening of our loving. This event, given at the Upaya Zen Center on June 25, 2023, includes short meditations and talks by Frank and Tara, and powerful sessions of questions and responses.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-05 Meditation: From Head to Full Being 18:56
When we are lost inside thoughts we lose connection with our heart, aliveness and spirit. This meditation guides us to a wakeful presence and invites us to return over and over from virtual reality into the mysterious, tender vastness that is our true being.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-07-05 Ask Me Anything with Tara and Jonathan (Part 2) 57:17
with Jonathan Foust, Tara Brach
“Ask Me Anything” – Tara responds to your questions, with Jonathan Foust, her husband and known meditation teacher, as interviewer.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-28 Meditation: Loving What Is 18:51
While we might not directly love what is, there is a pathway to this inner freedom. As we explore in this meditation, we begin with allowing the changing sensations and emotions to move through us, just as they are. As this allowing presence deepens, it becomes suffused with the tenderness of love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-28 Three Core Reminders for Spiritual Practice 57:05
This talk explores three powerful ways you can direct your attention when you find yourself emotionally stuck: Wake up from thoughts; feel your feelings and remember love. We explore both the habits blocking these basic movements toward freedom, and what nourishes them. Together they can serve to open your mind, awaken aliveness and heal your heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-21 Meditation: Meeting Life with a Kind Presence 20:16
This practice guides us to a receptive, kind presence by starting with listening, and moving through a body scan. We then rest in an open awareness, responding to whatever arises with a gentle attention.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-21 Ask Me Anything with Tara and Jonathan (Part 1) 55:33
with Jonathan Foust, Tara Brach
“Ask Me Anything” – Tara responds to your questions, with Jonathan Foust, her husband and known meditation teacher, as interviewer.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-14 Meditation: Resting in Breath, Relaxing into Life 21:38
This meditation invites us to collect our attention with a calming breath, and then with the senses as a home base, settle into presence. The reminders encourage a letting go of thoughts, shifting from virtual reality into the aliveness of moment-to-moment experience. In that letting go into life we find the stillness, wakefulness and openness of our true nature.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-14 Unwinding Anxiety with Awareness: A conversation with Tara and Dr. Judson Brewer (Part 2) 41:24
with Judson Brewer, Tara Brach
Anxiety is spiking around the world and we need the radical medicine of awareness to unwind it. In this two-part conversation, Tara and Dr. Judson Brewer look at how anxiety is a habit that can be unlearned as we cultivate a curious and kind mindful presence. Jud offers the scientific grounds for this “unwinding”, drawing on his experience as a pioneer and leading researcher in the field of mindfulness and addiction.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-07 Meditation – Cultivating a Relaxed Attention 21:28
In this meditation we engage a relaxed and alert attention by scanning through the body, opening to sound, and resting in the awareness that includes all the senses. This presence is stabilized with the use of a home base, for many the breath, and reminders to “relax back” when the mind naturally drifts.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-06-07 Unwinding Anxiety with Awareness: A conversation with Tara and Dr. Judson Brewer (Part 1) 53:03
with Judson Brewer, Tara Brach
Anxiety is spiking around the world and we need the radical medicine of awareness to unwind it. In this two-part conversation, Tara and Dr. Judson Brewer look at how anxiety is a habit that can be unlearned as we cultivate a curious and kind mindful presence. Jud offers the scientific grounds for this “unwinding”, drawing on his experience as a pioneer and leading researcher in the field of mindfulness and addiction. Together they explore the power of particular mindfulness-based strategies, including noting what is happening, recognizing our habit loops, arousing curiosity and cultivating self-care. They shine a light on the genesis of worrying, how it perpetuates anxiety and ways we can become disenchanted with the habit.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-31 Meditation: Relaxing with Life 20:53
This meditation begins with a body scan, and then we practice opening to and relaxing with our changing experience. The sitting closes with a beautiful poem by Danna Faulds, “Just for Now.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-31 Facing Fear (Part 2) – Awakening Your Fearless Heart 53:16
Fear is a natural and universal part of our incarnation, and, when it goes on overdrive, we get imprisoned in the suffering of separation. These two talks explore how the RAIN meditation can help us face fear, and discover the boundless loving awareness that includes but is not contracted by currents of fear. (Part 2)
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-24 Meditation: Open-Hearted Presence 22:58
This meditation establishes a kind attention by bringing the imagery and felt sense of a smile into the body scan and then, with the breath as a home base, opens the attention to changing experience. We end with a brief loving kindness reflection.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-24 Facing Fear (Part 1) – Awakening Your Fearless Heart 52:36
Fear is a natural and universal part of our incarnation, and, when it goes on overdrive, we get imprisoned in the suffering of separation. These two talks explore how the RAIN meditation can help us face fear, and discover the boundless loving awareness that includes but is not contracted by currents of fear.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-17 Meditation: Letting Life Live through You 15:52
This meditation awakens the senses and then guides us into the wakeful openness that includes the whole play of sensations, feelings and sound. We become fully awake and alive as we open to the awareness that allows life to live through us.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-05-17 Releasing the Habits That Imprison Your Spirit – Part 2 59:34
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
2023-05-10 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
2023-05-09 Meditation: Befriending Fear with RAIN (15 min.) 14:55
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
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: Inhabiting Awake Awareness 19:54
This meditation begins with collecting attention with the breath, and awakens us to the experience of aliveness and inner space by scanning the body. We then open to receive all the senses in awake awareness, and to inhabiting that boundless receptive awareness that is our home.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
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
2023-04-05 Meditation: Vast and Timeless Presence (19:57 min.) 19:56
The pathway to inhabiting our full presence is including, with mindfulness all parts of experience. This guided meditation explores how we can open, without resistance to the changing flow of sensations, feelings, thoughts and sounds, and discover the boundless awareness that is our true home.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-04-05 Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World – Part 1 51:44
This 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
2023-03-29 Meditation: Cultivating Deep Listening 19:54
Deep listening expresses the purity and presence of our true nature. This meditation guides us to come into a state of listening that is spacious, receptive and profoundly wakeful and present. We close with the poem “lost” by David Wagoner.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-29 The Power of Deep Listening – Part 2 50:59
Listening deeply is the gateway to realizing connection. It’s what allows us to move through life with a wise, loving and healing presence. These two talks explore our blocks to true listening, and offer teachings and practices that can directly cultivate this invaluable capacity.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-22 Meditation: Aliveness and Presence 20:49
This meditation guides us to wake up our senses and full aliveness through a body scan, and then to rest in the formless presence that is aware of this changing dance of life. We close with a poem by Robert Hall.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-22 The Power of Deep Listening – Part 1 65:35
Listening deeply is the gateway to realizing connection. It’s what allows us to move through life with a wise, loving and healing presence. These two talks explore our blocks to true listening, and offer teachings and practices that can directly cultivate this invaluable capacity.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-15 Compassion for All Living Beings 1:28:53
We often talk of widening the circles of compassion. This talk explores the qualities of mature compassion, what blocks us from this embodied and inclusive caring, and how each of us can awaken a heart that responds to our world’s suffering. This event was live-streamed and includes a talk, several guided reflections, and a Q&A session.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-15 Meditation: Say “Yes” to Life 11:49
This guided practice awakens a relaxed and friendly attention that rests in the breath and opens to whatever is arising. We deepen that presence with the intention to truly say “Yes” to experience, allowing life to be just as it is.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-08 The Wings of Awakening – Self-Honesty & Love (retreat talk) 63:21
We evolve our consciousness by bringing a clear and kind attention to the tangles of suffering. This talk explores how the “second arrow” of self-judgment imprisons us in emotional reactivity, and the pathways of awakening awareness that reconnect us with our full human potential. (This talk was given at the 2016 IMCW fall retreat.)
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-08 Meditation: Spacious Sky of Awareness 18:03
This meditation begins with a body scan that guides us to awaken our senses. We relax open to include the changing flow of sounds and sensations, in a spacious, open awareness (a morning meditation from the 2015 IMCW New Year silent retreat).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-01 Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life 17:27
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.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-03-01 Making the Whole World Your Friend 45:46
A wonderful translation of the Pali word Metta is friendliness. This talk looks at friendliness through an evolutionary lens, and explores ways we can cultivate a more open heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-22 Part 2: Refuge in the Wilderness – Coming Home to Embodied Presence 53:21
When we live from our mental control towers, we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and the sacred presence that underlies all lived experience.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-22 Meditation: Homecoming to Our Life Breath 15:49
Perhaps the most universal place to collect and deepen attention is the breath. This meditation begins with an intentional breath that calms the nervous system, and then opens to a clear, intimate presence with our natural breathing. With breath as our home base, we practice returning again and again when the mind becomes distracted. As presence grows, we can let the breath be in the foreground, and include whatever waves of life come and go. This brings a quiet mind, and a peaceful, happy heart.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-15 Meditation: Opening to Full Aliveness 17:42
This meditation includes relaxing and awakening through the body, widening the lens to include sound and then letting life live through us, receiving all that arises in open awareness.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-15 Part 1: Refuge in the Wilderness – Coming Home to Embodied Presence 53:59
When we live from our mental control towers, we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and the sacred presence that underlies all lived experience.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-08 Meditation: Vipassana – The Practice of Seeing Clearly 18:12
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
2023-02-08 The RAIN of Forgiveness 56:17
The capacity to release the armoring of hatred and blame is intrinsic to our evolving consciousness. This talk explores the process of authentic forgiveness, and how we can use the mindfulness-based tool of RAIN to heal and free our hearts.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2023-02-01 Meditation: Opening to the River of Aliveness 17:52
This meditation guides us to awaken to sensation using the image of a smile and scanning through the body. We then open to sound and to the entire changing flow of experience. When we connect with the changing flow of sensations, feelings and sounds, we also discover the formless awareness that is our Source… and home.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC

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