Tara Brach
If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.Collection: Sympathy
True refuge is that which allows us to be at home, at peace, to discover true happiness. The only thing that can give us true refuge is the awareness and love that is intrinsic to who we are. Ultimately, it's our own true nature.Collection: Happiness
I decided to write 'True Refuge' during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.Collection: Fitness
Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, 'Hey, come back over here, reconnect.' The only way that you'll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.Collection: Freedom
Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we will spontaneously reach out when others are hurting. Living in an ethical way can attune us to the pain and needs of others, but when our hearts are open and awake, we care instinctively.
With an undefended heart, we can fall in love with life over and over every day. We can become children of wonder, grateful to be walking on earth, grateful to belong with each other and to all of creation. We can find our true refuge in every moment, in every breath.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
My first book, 'Radical Acceptance', grew out of the suffering of feeling personally deficient and unworthy. Because most of us are so quick to turn against ourselves, the teachings and practices of radical acceptance continue as a strong current in 'True Refuge': nurturing a forgiving, understanding heart is a basic step on the path.
We are mindful of desire when we experience it with an embodied awareness, recognizing the sensations and thoughts of wanting as arising and passing phenomena. While this isn't easy, as we cultivate the clear seeing and compassion of Radical Acceptance, we discover we can open fully to this natural force, and remain free in its midst.
There is so much division in this world. So what is really the path of healing? It can begin in this moment, by embracing the life that's here.
My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.
I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.
I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.
Quite simply, if you're feeling anxious, angry, a sense of shame, whatever it is, breathe in and agree to touch or feel it. Breathing out, offer space and care to whatever's there. If there's blocking to touching it, emphasize the in-breath and stay embodied.
When I was first introduced to Buddhism in a high school World Studies class, I dismissed it out of hand. This was during the hedonistic days of the late '60s, and this spiritual path seemed so grim with its concern about attachment and, apparently, anti-pleasure.
Imagine you are walking in the woods and you see a small dog sitting by a tree. As you approach it, it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. You are frightened and angry. But then you notice that one of its legs is caught in a trap. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern: You see that the dog's aggression is coming from a place of vulnerability and pain. This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful ways, it is because we are caught in some kind of trap. The more we look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and one another, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.Collection: Dog
There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.Collection: Saying Yes
Mindfulness is a pause - the space between stimulus and response: that's where choice lies.Collection: Lying
Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.Collection: Expression
Most of us need to be reminded that we are good, that we are lovable, that we belong. If we knew just how powerfully our thoughts, words, and actions affected the hearts of those around us, we'd reach out and join hands again and again. Our relationships have the potential to be a sacred refuge, a place of healing and awakening. With each person we meet, we can learn to look behind the mask and see the one who longs to love and be loved.Collection: Healing
We wait for things to be different in order to feel okay with life. As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we’ll always be left waiting for it.Collection: Order
Extend an act of kindness each day. No one has to know. It can be a smile, reassuring words, a small favor - without expecting something in return.Collection: Kindness
The most powerful healing arises from the simple intention to love the life within you, unconditionally, with as much tenderness and presence as possible.Collection: Powerful
I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.Collection: Moving
Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.Collection: Beautiful
Underneath the stress is fear, and the biggest is our own personal fear of failure.Collection: Stress
Our attitude in the face of life's challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.Collection: Wisdom
Just remember that everyone is struggling; everyone is living with fear and uncertainty and it doesn't matter what their politics are.Collection: Struggle
There are some things we can't choose, but in being present we can choose how we want to relate to themCollection: Want
Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.Collection: Compassion
You can think of spiritual practice as a kind of spiritual re-parenting ... You're offering yourself the two qualities that make up good parenting: understanding - seeing yourself for who you truly are - and relating to what you see with unconditional love.Collection: Spiritual
Emotions are the interaction of thoughts and of sensations in the body.Collection: Body
Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.Collection: Eye
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.Collection: Dream
Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.Collection: Acceptance
When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.Collection: Life
The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.Collection: Focus
The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.Collection: Imperfection
We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.Collection: Mom
If you can, do a gratitude practice: Each day write down three things you're grateful for. There are different ways to do this. You can have a gratitude buddy, someone with whom, at the end of the day, you exchange messages listing these three things you are grateful for. Also, you can journal it or reflect on it silently.Collection: Gratitude
Our greatest longing is to be intimate.Collection: Longing
That non-attachment gives us the freedom to be exactly who we are.Collection: Attachment
If attachment then carries forward in a way that's not healthy, we need to let it be there without making it wrong and bring as compassionate and honest attention to it as possible. Honor that this is part of being human, but it's important to know when it's getting in the way.Collection: Attachment
In the process of deeply accepting our own inner experience, instead of being identified with a story of a limited self, we realize the compassion and wakefulness that is our essence.Collection: Compassion
If I can forgive the attachment in myself and open to the vulnerability that's underneath it, then rather than fixating on another person to satisfy my need, I'm actually going right to where the needs come from and able to bring a real healing.Collection: Real
I knew I could hold myself with that absolute love and compassion.Collection: Compassion
I think of desire as the essence that brings forth the whole universe.Collection: Thinking
Somewhere in my early twenties I realized I was pretty constantly monitoring myself, judging how I was always falling short, whether it was about not being a good enough daughter or friend, or my appearance, or whatever. I ended up becoming involved with a spiritual path in the yogic tradition, living in an ashram, doing a very rigorous spiritual practice.Collection: Daughter