Donations on this site go directly to Tara and will be used to support ongoing audio dharma and guided meditations, as well as to fund the translation and offering of talks in Spanish. Please consider a donation of any size - your generosity is greatly appreciated!

Financial support can also be given by making your tax-deductible secure donation to IMCW online. You may specify the donation to support online audio in the "notes" section.
Or, mail a check payable to IMCW, P.O. Box 3, Cabin John, MD 20818.

The talks below are freely available. All files are in .mp3 format - you can play them on your computer, iPod, or other .mp3 player. To download, right-click (or Control-click on the Mac) and select "Save As" or "Save Target As."

Listen or Subscribe to Tara's Podcast

Joy
Joy is an innate capacity, one of the primary expressions of an awakened heart and mind. Yet because of our conditioned patterns of thought and emotion, this capacity for openness, happiness and full aliveness can be obscured. This talk guides us in how to nurture joy through a commited presence that unfolds into "loving what is."

Compassion - Responding to Suffering with Care
Our capacity to respond to ourselves and our world with compassion is the essence of all healing and spiritual awakening. This talk explores the trance of separation that blocks our natural compassion, and includes guided practices that enable us to directly cultivate a compassionate heart.

Metta - Lovingkindness
This talk explores what gets in the way of loving presence and the training that awakens and frees our hearts.

Blessings of a Forgiving Heart
The roots of peace and war are within these very hearts. In the moments that we release blame, we reconnect with the compassionate presence that heals ourselves and others as well. This talk includes a meditation that guides us in awakening our capacity to forgive.

Self-Forgiveness
Holding ourselves with a compassionate, forgiving heart is the gateway to healing, and to intimacy with our world. This talk explores our deep conditioning to be at war with ourselves, and the insights and elements of forgiving that can carry us home to loving presence.

Trusting Who We Are
If we investigate, we will find that much suffering arises out of mistrust--of ourselves, others and life. This talk explores the genesis of the great challenges of doubt and mistrust, and the pathway to trusting the goodness that is our essence.

Turning Towards What You Love
For many of us, the most apparent junctures of spiritual transformation are spurred on by challenging life situations. This talk looks at how our conscious aspiration for awakening, and our practice of mindful presence, can help us find peace, compassion and freedom when difficulties arise.

The Power of Mind
The Buddha taught that "Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind." This talk explores how our intention and attention can tap into the living awareness that is our source, and give rise to healing of body, heart and spirit.

The Fires of Loss
We all encounter the great losses of our own health and life, and of cherished others. We are conditioned to resist opening to the rawness and grief that comes with loss. This talk describes the refuge of presence in the face of loss, and the gift of timeless love that arises as we make peace with the reality of this living, dying world.

Tara references Toni Bernhard's new book, How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers, in this talk.

The Unreal Other
When we experience others through a conditioned lens of wants and fears, and of unexamined beliefs, we react in ways that cause distance and sometimes obvious injury. This talk explores how we create separation from others, and the ways we can awaken from this trance and live from genuine empathy and wisdom.

Part 2 - Relating Wisely with Fear
While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.

Part 1 - Relating Wisely with Fear
While fear is essential to survival, it can also strangle our capacity to live fully and awaken spiritually. These two talks explore how fear takes over our lives, and the ways we can train our attention to free ourselves from its grip.

Desire and Spiritual Freedom
The Buddha taught that becoming identified with "wanting mind" obscures our true nature and binds us in suffering. This talk explores a wise attitude in relating to desire, and offers three pathways towards freedom: Mindfulness of "wanting mind," trancing back desire to its source, and radical non-clinging.

Relating Wisely to "Wanting Mind"
While desire is intrinsic to life, it can contract into the craving that traps us in suffering. This talk explores how we seek happiness yet become habituated to false refuges--substitutes like over- consuming food, dependent relationships, approval, achieving--that can never bring happiness. Our freedom becomes possible when we forgive the ways we get hooked, and offer a deep, mindful attention to the energies of craving and clinging.

Anh-Houng Nguyen was the guest speaker at RRUUC on May 5th. Her talk is posted soon at the IMCW Guest Speaker page.

As Tara was away on retreat, she sent a talk to her podcast from May 2008:
My Religion is Kindness
Hope you'll enjoy it again, too.

Embodied Spirit
The Buddha taught that mindfulness of the body is a direct path to the realization of truth, to peace and freedom. This talk explores how we leave a present-centered awareness of our body, and the pathways of homecoming.

True Belonging - Refuge in Presence and Relatedness
We become homesick when our insecurity compels us to find refuge in exclusive affiliations, in over-consuming, in avoiding intimacy or grasping tightly to the approval of others. This talk explores how we come home to the truth of who we are by connecting with our moment to moment experience, and by developing the capacity to be wakeful, giving and receptive in loving relationship.

Cheri Maples talked at RRUUC - you can hear her meditation and talk, "Ten Tips for Spring" at the IMCW Guest Speaker page. Please see her "Mindfulness and Justice" website at www.mindfulnessandjustice.org for more information about Cheri's work.

As Tara was away, she sent two talks to her podcast from April 2008:
Realizing Our Natural Joy - Part 1 and
Realizing Our Natural Joy - Part 2.
Hope you'll enjoy them again, too.

Beyond Small Self
While we are conditioned to become identified with limited sense of self, we have the capacity to recognize and open to who we are beyond the self. This talk investigates our most compelling domains of getting identified, and the ways a purposeful presence can awaken us.

Meditation and Healing Trauma
Spiritual awakening often involves offering a healing presence to the suffering of post traumatic stress or deep emotional wounding. This talk explores the three key elements that support this process: self-forgiveness, accessing a source of love and safety, and bringing a kind attention to the unlived life in the body.

The Blessings of Deep Listening
Our capacity to listen deeply--to our inner life and each other--is the grounds of true understanding and love. This talk explores the challenges to listening and guidelines and practices that awaken a listening heart.

Realizing Your True Nature--Four Reflections
This talk explores a Tibetan teaching through reflection and guided meditations: Our true nature--our inherent wakefuness, openness and love--is closer than we can imagine; it is more profound than we can imagine; it is easier than we can imagine; and it is more wondrous than we can imagine.

Trusting Your Basic Goodness
When we don't trust who we are, we are unable to be at home in our world. This talk explores how we come to be at war with ourselves and the pathway to realizing our basic goodness.

Living Aligned with the Heart
We suffer when our words or actions arise from unconscious wants and fears. This talk explores how we can awaken from the habitual ways we cause harm to ourselves and others, and live from our natural intelligence and tender warmth.

Deepening Practice
This talk and question/answer format addresses the attitudes and practices that cultivate our natural wisdom and compassion.

Part 2 - Presence & Aliveness
These two talks [part 1 last week] explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Part 1 - Presence & Aliveness
These two talks explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Awakening to the Sacred
The tendency to think "life should be different" and to try to control experience removes us from the wisdom and compassion that naturally gives rise to healing and transformation. We learn to trust the power of our heart and awareness by meeting both the pain and beauty of this life with sacred presence.

Taking Refuge
The Buddha taught of three archetypal domains in which we awaken presence and realize freedom. In contrast to our habitual false refuges, these gateways of true refuge are dependable because they express the timeless truth of what we are. This talk shines a light on false refuges, guides us in exploring the meaning of each of the three Buddhist refuges and ends in a ritual of "taking refuge."