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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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2021-01-20 Meditation: Refuge of Living Presence 12:17
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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
2021-01-20 Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 2 55:53
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In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding—to ourselves, each other and our world– with courageous, wise hearts.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2021-01-13 Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 1 44:04
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In the face of violence, hatred and loss, how do we handle the reactivity we feel? Our own anger, hatred and fear? These two talks offer guidance and practice in letting our own vulnerability be a portal to responding – to ourselves, each other and our world – with courageous, wise hearts.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2021-01-13 Meditation: Reconnecting to Silence and Presence 19:12
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Only in silence and presence do we realign with what matters to our hearts. This simple practice of arriving in an embodied awareness supports us in touching the grounds of true transformation and healing. It closes with a powerful poem by Gunilla Norris, “Sharing Silence.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2021-01-06 The Three Refuges – Gateways to Awakening 1:10:26
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We all seek refuge, a sense of safety or homecoming amidst the uncertainties of life. Our way of finding refuge can either imprison or free us. This talk explores the false refuges that entrap us in feeling separate and endangered, and the refuges of Awareness (Buddha,) Truth (Dharma) and Love (Sangha) that reveal our true nature. This evening gathering includes a ceremony with candles, reflection and music.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2021-01-06 Meditation: A Present Heart 18:32
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One translation of mindfulness, in Chinese, is “present heart.” In this guided meditation we begin by awakening through the body and the senses, and then open the attention to the changing flow of experience. The intention is to meet whatever arises with a wakeful and kind presence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-23 Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs 56:06
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We suffer when we are caught in beliefs of our own or other’s badness, unworthiness, or lack of value. These beliefs hurt our bodies, lead to violent and/or addictive behaviors, and separate us from our own heart and each other. This talk explores how we can discover who we are beyond these beliefs by recognizing when we are trapped, and learning how to turn to presence and love (dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-16 The Four Remembrances 50:42
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When we attune to the reality of impermanence and death, we remember what most matters to us. But in daily life we can lose precious swaths of time in a reactive trance, on our way somewhere else, and lost in problem solving, judgment and worry. This talk reflects on four remembrances or practices—Pausing, Yes to life, Turning toward love, and Resting in awareness—that help us awaken from trance and live true to the loving presence that is our essence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-09 Meditation: Meeting Life with a Spacious Heart 22:00
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Especially when we’re stressed, we need pathways to an allowing, kind presence. This meditation guides us to relax and open through our bodies, and then meet changing waves of experience with a sea of awareness that is intrinsically allowing and tender.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-09 Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering 46:31
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Great spiritual leaders of social movements teach that true transformation arises from realizing our interconnectedness, and the light of the divine in each being. Sadly, through human history, much suffering has come from perceiving others as bad-others, flawed humans who are excluded from our heart. This talk looks at how our stories and mistrust of others—in personal relationships and in our society—can lead to cycles of violence, harm, and deepening alienation. We then explore the inner process that helps us shift to “bad behavior, not bad human” and allows us to respond to suffering with love-in-action.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-02 Meditation: Relaxing Back into Awareness 21:28
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When we are in our daily trance, we are often leaning forward, on our way somewhere else. In this meditation we are guided to relax back into the awareness that is always, already here. We explore relaxing back through a body scan, and then with all our senses wide open. With practice we increasingly find our pathway home by relaxing the clench of doings, and resting in what is.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-09-02 Transforming Your Relationship with Anxiety 1:19:29
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Strong anxiety frequently triggers fight-flight-freeze, our survival brain’s strategy for dealing with threats. This can become a trance that dominates our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and deepest experience of who we are. This talk explores how we get caught in this reactive trance, and ways of calming anxiety and radically shifting our way of relating to the experience of threat. The gift is discovering an inner freedom in the midst of life, and the capacity to respond to what arises with love-in-action.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-26 Meditation: Resting in Awake Awareness 18:49
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This practice opens with a body scan, employing the image and felt sense of a smile to awaken awareness through the body. We then open to all the senses, and rest in the awareness that includes this changing life.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-26 Worrier Pose: Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear 59:27
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While fear is a natural part of our make up, many of us suffering when the “on” button gets jammed. This talk looks at how our fears generate habitual patterns of physical tension, anxious thinking, emotions and behaviors; and how this constellation prevents us from inhabiting our full wisdom and love. We then explore two interrelated pathways of healing—unconditional presence, and resourcing, or cultivating access to safety and belonging (from the IMCW Fall 2018 7-Day Silent Retreat).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-19 Radical Love: Part 2 – Loving Ourselves into Healing 49:16
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Radical love sees and cherishes the sacred that lives through all beings. In this talk, we’ll look at the barrier to loving the life that is right here—what we call self—and how we can call on the light and warmth of awareness to awaken that love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-19 Meditation: A Present Heart 22:12
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This guided practice emphasizes bringing a gentle and kind attention to our bodies, and then including all experience with a receptive presence. We close by identifying a part of our being that is asking for a healing attention, and offering loving presence to ourself and then to others.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-12 Meditation: Cultivating an Intimate Presence 24:24
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This guided meditation cultivates a relaxed, gentle presence with whatever expressions of life are arising in the moment. We begin by releasing and opening through the body, and then include all sensations, feelings and sounds in an intimate, allowing presence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-12 Learning to Respond, Not React 51:06
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When stressed, we often react with looping fear-thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others. This talk offers three interrelated strategies that can serve us when we’re triggered by stress, and help us find our way back to our natural wisdom, empathy and wholeness of being. By de-conditioning habitual reactivity, we are increasingly able to respond to our life circumstances in ways that serve healing and awakening.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-08-05 Guided Meditation: Openhearted Presence 21:57
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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
2020-08-05 Radical Love: Part 1 - Reflections that Awaken our Heart 54:31
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Radical love arises from the purity of our awake awareness, and cuts through the delusion of being separate and not OK. It comes from and brings out our intrinsic goodness. These talks explore the barriers to this embodied, inclusive and active loving, and include reflections that can help us to free our own hearts and bring true healing to our world.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-29 Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence 19:54
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Starting with scanning through the body and awakening the senses, we then rest in presence, with the breath as a home base. The meditation invites an openness to whatever arises, and a gentle kind attention if we encounter physical or emotional pain. We end with a prayer that includes our own being and all beings (from the 2017 archives).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-29 Your Awake Heart is Calling You 50:50
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As individuals and societies, we are pulled by both the insecurity of our evolutionary past, and by our awake heart, our capacity for mindfulness and compassion. This talk explores the ways we can listen to and respond to the call of our awake heart, by training ourselves to open to vulnerability (our own and others) and widen the circles of compassion (a favorite from the 2017 archives).
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-22 Meditation: Gateway to Natural Presence 17:17
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We enter a full presence through awakening our senses, and awakening to the awareness that is aware. This meditation guides us as we arouse an embodied presence, let go of any controlling, then discover the natural spaciousness and wakefulness that is the essence of what we are. “You might feel your body breathing…”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-22 Love and Fear During Times of War: An Interview with Lama Rod Owens 49:38
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The world is having a difficult moment. Each day we learn of a different conflict or crisis, which threatens the lives of so may people. It is easy to live with a lot of fear right now and it is even easier to react out of that fear was well. When we react out of fear we tend to create much more harm in the world. This is a time of darkness and war and fear lies at the heart of much of the violence we are experiencing. How do we befriend our fear and offer it permission to teach us how to move through it into a state of freedom? How do we use our fear to connect to the fear so many other people are experiencing? Ultimately, how do we begin to love what is unlovable, especially our fear? During their time together, Tara and Lama Rod call on the teachings of Buddhadharma as well as their own intrinsic wisdom to lean into fear with love.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-15 Meditation: Listening to Life 48:41
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The attitude of meditation is one of engaged listening – a relaxed, receptive yet intimate attention. This meditation explores how we can listen to sounds, listen to and feel sensations, and then relax back into the ocean of awareness that includes and perceives the changing waves. In this relaxing back, we realize the peace and freedom of inhabiting our wholeness and essence. This meditation ends with a tribute to Thich Nhat Hanh’s life and a reading from his writings on death and life.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-15 The Sacred Art of Listening 48:41
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Just as presence is the heart of meditation, so deep listening is at the center of all conscious, loving relationships. This talk explores how our wants and fears block listening, ways we can deepen our capacity for listening, and the healing that unfolds when we truly feel heard by another (a special talk from the archives). What happens when you’re really listening?
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-08 Meditation: The Space of Loving Awareness 18:21
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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
2020-07-08 The Heart Crosses the Abyss - Three Inner Trainings 49:11
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In the moments when we either resist or get possessed by our strong emotions, we are in a trance, and cut off from openhearted awareness. This talk explores the truth that “it’s not what’s happening, it’s how we’re relating.” We look at three key trainings that help us relate to difficult emotions with a wise and compassionate presence.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-01 Meditation: Calling on Our Inner Bodhisattva 21:11
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We each have within us the very source of wisdom and love. This meditation calls forward that essence, our awakening heart, so we can seek guidance and nurturing for the parts of us that need a healing attention.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-07-01 Shame, Healing and Transformation 48:43
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Being at war with ourselves blocks us from evolving our consciousness and living from our hearts. This talk distinguishes between toxic and healthy shame, as well as shame about our individual self and our group identity. We explore how, with self-compassion and courageous honesty, we can respond to negative, painful feelings about ourselves in a way that serves awakening and alignment with our deepest values.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-24 Meditation: Body and Spirit 19:21
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As we relax and awaken through our physical body, we discover the formless dimension of awareness or spirit that permeates all of life. This meditation includes a poem from Mary Oliver.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-24 Spiritual Hope 52:53
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Spiritual hope opens us to possibility and energizes us to manifest our potential for love and wisdom. In contrast to attachment or egoic hope, which is the grasping for what will benefit a separate self, spiritual hope arises from trust in the openhearted awareness (bodhichitta) that is always and already within us. This talk explores how, as individuals and as a society, we can nourish spiritual hope, and create the grounds for healing and radical transformation.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-17 Meditation: Embodied Metta 19:35
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Lovingkindness becomes full when it is energetically experienced in our bodies. This meditation guides us in awakening the receptivity, warmth and openness of metta through our body, and then invites us to rest in the space of loving presence, as we open to whatever arises.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-17 Sustaining Our Caring 39:45
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All transformation arises out of love; it is the energy of caring about life that moves us toward inner, relational and societal healing. With a primary focus on our radically re-enlivened movement for racial justice and equity, this talk looks at ways of remembering what matters and consciously nourishing our care.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-10 Meditation: Inner Refuge of Calm 21:09
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In times of great stress, it’s crucial that we have pathways to quiet our minds, relax our bodies and rest in a calm, steady presence. This meditation guides us in using the breath, body scan, and a home base of presence to find that inner refuge that can carry us through difficult times.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-10 Meditation: Meeting Anger with Awareness 15:15
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When anger is held in mindfulness, it can energize us to respond wisely to challenging situations. This meditation guides us in meeting personal or societal anger with RAIN – recognize, allow, investigate and nurture. [NOTE: this meditation was given at the end of Tara’s Anger and Transformation talk on 2020-06-10. A brief context is given, then the meditation begins at 4:56.]
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-10 Anger and Transformation 49:21
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The purpose of anger is to let us know there’s an obstacle to our wellbeing, and to energize us to act. While natural and necessary for survival and thriving, this powerful energy often possesses us and leads to suffering. This talk explores how we can use the RAIN meditation in our personal and societal life, to meet anger with a mindful, compassionate presence. Freed from the identification with a limited, separate reactive self, we can listen to the message of anger, draw on the purity of its energy, and respond from our natural intelligence, creativity and care.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-03 Meditation: Homecoming to Wakeful Presence 20:04
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This meditation begins with us standing in mindful movement, guiding us in awakening awareness in the body. Then in sitting practice, we open all our senses, resting in the wakeful presence that can include the changing waves of our life.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-06-03 A Courageous Presence with Racism 38:13
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Anti-Black racism is the core wound of American culture, and we each have a role to play in fighting racism, a medicine to bring to these times. This talk explores how we can offer an honest and courageous presence to key domains of this suffering. We then look at affirming that Black lives truly matter with our dedicated and wise action.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-20 Meditation: The Art of Letting Go 19:15
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Letting go means releasing the resistance we have to experiencing the present moment. This meditation guides us to let go of the thoughts that block our immediate sensory experience, the tension in the body that reduces aliveness and the armoring around the heart that dulls our sensitivity and tenderness toward life itself.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-20 Embracing Uncertainty: Sheltering in Love - Part 9 44:57
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How we tolerate uncertainty - during current times and throughout our lives - has a powerful effect on our capacity for presence, aliveness and love. This talk explores the conditioned ways of reacting to insecurity that contract us, and pathways of letting go of resistance, opening to Beginner's mind and discovering a timeless, wise and loving presence in the midst of inevitable change.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-13 Meditation: Living, Embodied Presence 22:32
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This practice begins with a full body scan and then guides us to return again and again to our senses. What we find is a dynamic presence, a Hereness that feels like home. The meditation ends with a beautiful poem by David Wagoner called, “Lost.”
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-13 Sheltering in Love – Part 8: Finding Freedom in the Midst of Failure 45:56
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Everyone faces personal failure, and it’s an extremely raw and painful feeling. If we have the courage to stay with the feelings, failure can become a portal to the realization of who we are beyond the imperfect separate self. This talk calls on Samuel Beckett’s wonderful quote (referenced by Pema Chödron), “Fail, Fail again, Fail better,” and offers guidance on finding freedom as we move through some of our most difficult moments.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-06 Meditation: Openhearted Presence 23:25
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This meditation guides us in embodying loving presence through a body scan, and then meeting whatever arises with a tender heart. We close with a beautiful blessing-poem from John O’Donohue.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-05-06 Sheltering in Love – Part 7: Awakening from the Prison of Blame 43:14
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A key way stress disconnects us from ourselves and each other is through the limbic reactivity of blame. This talk helps us to recognize the suffering of chronic blame, resentment and anger, and to bring a healing presence to the vulnerability that underlies blame.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-04-29 Sheltering In Love (Part 6): Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence (Part 2) 51:05
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The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. These two talks look at the epidemic of loneliness predating the pandemic, and how loneliness is exacerbated in our current global crisis for those living alone, and for those feeling disconnected to themselves and others. We then explore how a courageous practice of compassionate presence - with our inner life, and in relationships - can turn the energy of loneliness into a current of healing and freedom.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-04-29 Meditation: Vipassana - Seeing Life As It Is 27:36
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This classic Buddhist meditation trains us to wake up out of thoughts and to attend to our changing experience with a balanced, clear and open presence. Enjoy a bit longer meditation with several quiet pauses.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-04-22 Meditation: Relaxing Back into Natural Awareness 27:08
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In this meditation we are guided to discover the space and aliveness that fills the body, sense the space in the universe, and then to realize our Beingness as continuous space, filled with the light of awareness. When our attention contracts into thoughts, the pathway to awareness is a relaxing back, reopening to the natural openness, silence and stillness of our true nature.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-04-22 Sheltering in Love (Part 5): Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence (Part 1) 44:51
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The root of suffering is the pain of separation, the fears and loneliness that arise when we have forgotten our intrinsic belonging to each other and to all of life. These next two talks look at the epidemic of loneliness predating the pandemic, and how loneliness is exacerbated in our current global crisis for those living alone, and for those feeling disconnected to themselves and others. We then explore how a courageous practice of compassionate presence - with our inner life, and in relationships - can turn the energy of loneliness into a current of healing and freedom.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC
2020-04-15 Meditation: Refuge in Sacred Presence 22:29
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Our experience includes a foreground of changing experience - sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts. In the background is an alert inner stillness, the awareness that is our true nature. This meditation guides us in opening to the moment-to-moment flow through our senses, and learning to relax back to inhabit the mystery and vastness of awake awareness.
Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC

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