Tara Brach Quotes

In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.

People don't behave in angry ways unless they are feeling stressed and conflicted too.

We are continually experiencing the conditioning to hold on, tighten, or resist.

People have to find their rhythm. Some people have need for more contact and time together and some people need more space.

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.

There's healthy attachment, like with a mother and child. It's biologically part of our survival.

Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.

It is natural that our minds replay old stories, because that is our own mechanism for trying to work out unresolved problems. Yet rerunning those stories will be a fruitless looping until we learn how to move from the story into our body. This is why therapy alone often doesn't bring full healing and awakening.

It is through realizing loving presence as our very essence, through being that presence, that we discover true freedom.

Meditation helps us to get out of our thoughts about the future and really be in the present moment.

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.

In intimate relationships, if we start trying to be more real, it's very scary.

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.

The process of radical acceptance is to accept that a story has appeared in the mind, and then deepen the attention to see clearly what's happening in the body, to regard those feelings and sensations with kindness and acceptance, and to notice how they come and go.

Offer some gesture of kindness to yourself. Sometimes it's just a message, to say: "It's okay. You're going to be okay. We've been through this before." The intention is reassurance, that you are not alone and you can do this. It is the most powerful way to come out of what I call the "trance of unworthiness."

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

Even a few moments of offering lovingkindness can reconnect you with the purity of your loving heart.

Compassion can be described as letting ourselves be touched by the vulnerability and suffering that is within ourselves and all beings. The full flowering of compassion also includes action: Not only do we attune to the presence of suffering, we respond to it.

Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.

We can find true refuge within our own hearts and minds-right here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-momen t lives.

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.

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.

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.

We want to be in open, loving communion with each other and our greatest fear is intimacy. That it won't work and we'll be rejected.

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.

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.