Tara Brach Quotes (102) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Tara Brach (born May 17, 1953) is an American psychologist and proponent of Buddhist meditation. She is a guiding teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C. (IMCW). Dr. Brach teaches their Wednesday night meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. Brach also teaches about Buddhist meditation at centers for meditation and yoga in the United States and Europe including Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, the Kripalu Center, and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. Brach is an engaged Buddhist specializing in the application of Buddhist teachings to emotional healing. Her 2003 book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, focuses on the use of practices such as mindfulness for healing trauma. Her 2013 book, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, offers practices for tapping into inner peace and wisdom in the midst of difficulty. See website for more info - https://www.tarabrach.com
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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.
― Tara Brach
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach,
“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.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
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.
― Tara Brach
Happiness lies not in finding what is missing,
but in finding what is present.
― Tara Brach
There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.
― Tara Brach
There are some things we can't choose, but in being present we can choose how we want to relate to them
― Tara Brach
By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.
― Tara Brach
The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Our attitude in the face of life's challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.
― Tara Brach
Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Where desire ends up causing suffering is when it fixates.
― Tara Brach
Imperfection is not our personal problem - it is a natural part of existing.
― Tara Brach
When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.
― Tara Brach
Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There’s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what’s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom.
― Tara Brach
People don't behave in angry ways unless they are feeling stressed and conflicted too.
― Tara Brach
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you—when there’s a loss that will alter your life forever—you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you’ve touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are.
― Tara Brach
Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.
― Tara Brach
The most powerful healing arises from the simple intention to love the life within you, unconditionally, with as much tenderness and presence as possible.
― Tara Brach
Self-judgment continues to arise - it's a strong habit - but the fact that I made a conscious commitment to recognize it has helped me stop feeding the story of being unworthy.
― Tara Brach
I think it's possible to have experiences of love without attachment, but I think part of our conditioning is to grasp at times, especially when there are unmet needs. It's part of our nervous system to hold on to where we think those needs will be met.
― Tara Brach
The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.
― Tara Brach
Even going through the motions is a way of establishing a new relationship with our inner life that is caring and tender, versus one that is judging, distancing or ignoring. This is the beginning of being capable of intimacy with others.
― Tara Brach
Even a few moments of offering lovingkindness can reconnect you with the purity of your loving heart.
― Tara Brach
The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/ himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness.
― Tara Brach
The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.
― Tara Brach
When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.
― Tara Brach
Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.
― Tara Brach
With mindfulness training we are able to recognize when we get lost in our mental dramas, and bring a kind and nonreactive presence to the feelings that accompany them.
― Tara Brach
Whatever you encounter, may that be part of the path.
― Tara Brach
When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
― Tara Brach
The trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach. The path to "the sweetness of belonging," is acceptance - acceptance of ourselves and acceptance of others without judgment.
― Tara Brach
When desire for a certain person's attention becomes an "I have to have" kind of grasping, then identity gets organized around needing that and it becomes very solid and sticky. That causes suffering because we're not inhabiting the fullness of who we are, we're fixated and contracted on life being a certain way.
― Tara Brach
Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.
― Tara Brach
The mistake we make is that when we're feeling another person is not treating us in the way that makes us feel secure and loved, we fixate our attention on that person and what's wrong with them. We also fixate on what's wrong with us. Instead, we can bring forward two wings of awareness: the wing of mindfulness (noticing what's going on inside us) and the wing of kindness (compassion to what's going on inside us).
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Along with judging myself harshly, I'd also always seen the truth of goodness in me.
― Tara Brach
We're so used to presenting ourselves and getting approval according to our achievements that it's difficult to be authentic and trust that we'll be accepted just as we are.
― Tara Brach
No matter what feeling comes up - numbness, irritability, shame - if I let it arise and play itself through, I naturally open into wakefulness and care.
― Tara Brach
Most of us grew up with a very damaging story that something is wrong with us. Gradually - or as in my case, suddenly - we become resolved not to believe this anymore. It takes a dedicated practice to follow up on that resolution, because the conditioning is very strong to keep generating self-demeaning stories.
― Tara Brach
The way to develop the habit of savoring is to pause when something is beautiful and good and catches our attention - the sound of rain, the look of the night sky - the glow in a child's eyes, or when we witness some kindness. Pause... then totally immerse in the experience of savoring it.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
― Tara Brach
Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.
― Tara Brach
To me, bringing mindfulness-bas ed practices to students, teachers and parents is some of the most important work we can be doing. If we can help the next generation become more self-aware, empathetic and emotionally resilient, they will bring their wisdom to healing the earth and creating a more peaceful world.
― Tara Brach
Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.
― Tara Brach
Stories about ourselves and about the world continually arise in our minds and shape our beliefs about reality.
― Tara Brach
Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.
― Tara Brach
If [kids] get into loving relationships, they're afraid they'll be found wanting, won't have the looks or body shape our culture deems worthy. Many of us feel we're falling short and if we start feeling close to another person, that we'll be found out and rejected.
― Tara Brach
If we're not open to losing, we're not open to loving.
― Tara Brach
That non-attachment gives us the freedom to be exactly who we are.
― Tara Brach
The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.
― Tara Brach
On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Our greatest longing is to be intimate.
― Tara Brach
As we free ourselves from the suffering of 'something is wrong with me, 'we trust and express the fullness of who we are.'
― Tara Brach
Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.
― Tara Brach
Presence is not some exotic state that we need to search for or manufacture. In the simplest terms, it is the felt sense of wakefulness, openness, and tenderness that arises when we are fully here and now with our experience.
― Tara Brach
To open in a loving way is to let awareness notice that tightening.
― Tara Brach
Everything we love goes. So to be able to grieve that loss, to let go, to have that grief be absolutely full, is the only way to have our heart be full and open.
― Tara Brach
Telling each other the truth and being who we are, and having space for the other person's vulnerability in being who they are, allows us to move in a kind of dance together that's very fluid and graceful.
― Tara Brach
My understanding is that to love, we need to be able to totally surrender to the living/dying nature of this world.
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Most of us grow up with a sense of "I'm not intelligent enough." It's such a sad thing that in the West we worship a certain kind of left-brain intelligence.
― Tara Brach
When I'm attached, I find that I don't see the other person as clearly because I'm more caught up in what I'm wanting.
― Tara Brach
Discovering a richer quality of being-ness means to keep surrendering and letting go of resistance.
― Tara Brach
Our kids go to school and they come out feeling not intelligent, not desirable, not attractive or appealing to others.
― Tara Brach
People have to find their rhythm. Some people have need for more contact and time together and some people need more space.
― Tara Brach
I think of depression as the mechanism that pushes down the pain of that loss. It tries to distance us from the loss but it lowers our whole energy level. I think that's a pervasive way we end up responding to loss or the anticipation of loss. Natural but not necessary.
― Tara Brach
When we open to love, we become love.
― Tara Brach
But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.
― Tara Brach
In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.
― Tara Brach
In a basic way, acceptance is seeing clearly what's happening and holding it with kindness. This is a radical antidote to the suffering of judging mind.
― Tara Brach
It's the beginning of opening to love. Even if there's not much feeling of compassion toward oneself, just say, "It's okay, sweetheart," or "I'm sorry and I love you."
― Tara Brach
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.
― Tara Brach
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.
― Tara Brach
When I watch that attachment happening, I see the beliefs that I have around it. If somebody's not paying attention to me in a certain way, in my mind, it means they don't love me or they don't respect me. Bringing awareness to the beliefs that are underneath the attachment and bringing awareness to the way my body and heart are tightening, helps me wake up and re-inhabit a larger space of being. Holding on and pushing away might be going on but I'm freer to respond in a healthy way.
― Tara Brach
The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
― Tara Brach
Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.
― Tara Brach
We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.
― Tara Brach
I might find that I have a habit of being jealous and comparing myself with other people and riveting my attention on how much somebody else is accomplishing or doing, or how much better they are at such and such. First, I might recognize the story - the mental images and internal dialogue - and say, "Okay, comparing mind." Then, rather than staying caught in the content, I'll bring my attention into my body and open to the immediate feelings that are there.
― Tara Brach
As I noticed feelings and thoughts appear and disappear, it became increasingly clear that they were just coming and going on their own. . . . There was no sense of a self owning them.
― Tara Brach
The two wings of mindfulness and kindness will begin to open the heart to more connection with our world.
― 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.
― Tara Brach
Underneath the stress is fear, and the biggest is our own personal fear of failure.
― Tara Brach
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, its our own true nature.
― Tara Brach
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