Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 1

Cultivating a Courageous Heart – Part 1

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...
Meditation: Resting Your Heart in Presence (20:12 min.)

Meditation: Resting Your Heart in Presence (20:12 min.)

When we’re having difficulty, we typically tense up our body and mind, and armor our heart. This practice offers a pathway of relaxing that tension and tasting the peace that comes from resting in presence. When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night...
Freedom Beyond the Trance of Self

Freedom Beyond the Trance of Self

The gift of meditation is awakening to the vast, radiant ever-creative beingness that is beyond the confines of a constricting self-sense. This talk explores how awake awareness can directly meet the clench of selfing – the thoughts, emotional tensions and core...
Meditation: Embodying Acceptance and Care (15:34 min.)

Meditation: Embodying Acceptance and Care (15:34 min.)

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...
Guided Meditation: Resting in Knowing (20:43 min.)

Guided Meditation: Resting in Knowing (20:43 min.)

Behind the activity of thinking, and the ever-changing flow of sounds, sensations and feelings, there is a great and awake silence that holds all that unfolds. This space of awareness is our formless essence. Learning to open and rest into this alert, knowing vastness...
Waking up from Bias: A Conversation with Tara and Anurag (Anu) Gupta

Waking up from Bias: A Conversation with Tara and Anurag (Anu) Gupta

Given how our biases create separation and unfold into violence and suffering, this is a crucial domain for each of us to explore. In this interview, author and teacher Anurag Gupta offers his wise perspectives and invites Tara to share some of what she has learned in...
Meditation: Collecting, Unifying and Opening the Mind (25:06 min.)

Meditation: Collecting, Unifying and Opening the Mind (25:06 min.)

Collecting, unifying and opening the mind, we begin with a listening attention, noticing sounds that are here. Relaxing open and letting sounds wash through. With the same receptivity to sounds, listen to and feel the aliveness of the body. Listening to the breath as...
Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence (19:52 min.)

Meditation: A Witnessing, Kind Presence (19:52 min.)

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...
Inner and Outer Democracy: The Practice of True Inclusion

Inner and Outer Democracy: The Practice of True Inclusion

Happiness and freedom arise as we include all parts of our being in a loving awareness. In this talk we explore how this inner work of inclusion is the grounds of democracy, and how it enables us to participate in our relationships and society in a way that fosters...
Meditation: Awake, Relaxed and Open (26:27 min.)

Meditation: Awake, Relaxed and Open (26:27 min.)

This meditation includes a full body scan, and then opens the senses to all experience, allowing life to be just as it is. The training is a relaxing back, noticing the sounds that are here, feeling the aliveness of the body. We call on the two wings of wakefulness...
Trusting Your Basic Goodness: Part 2

Trusting Your Basic Goodness: Part 2

This talk continues the exploration of what causes our distrust of ourselves, others and life, and the pathways to realizing and trusting who we are. We explore the steps of awakening from limiting beliefs, dissolving the resistance to direct embodied presence, and...
Meditation: Entrusting Yourself to the Waves (25:59 min.)

Meditation: Entrusting Yourself to the Waves (25:59 min.)

By not resisting, by letting the waves wash through us, we begin to relax. Rather than fighting the stormy surges, we rest in an ocean of awareness that embraces all the moving waves. We arrive in a sanctuary that feels large enough to hold whatever is going on. Enjoy...