← Tara Brach
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- [00:00]
Tara Brach
Foreign.
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Podcast Host
Welcome friends, to the Tara Brak Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence.
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Tara Brach
Namaste. Letting the eyes close, feeling the movement of the breath and perhaps sensing the breath at the heart. As if you could breathe in and out of your heart. Taking these moments to listen and sense what your intention is right now, for your practice, for meditating, it's really the question what does my heart really long for? What most matters and the way you know you've connected with your heart is there can be a quality of sincerity, kind of innocence. One of the most powerful pathways to presence is awakening through the body. Inhabiting these bodies with awareness and you might begin by gently scanning through your body and noticing if there's any areas of really obvious tension or tightness sense it wants to let go a little sometimes around the eyes you can feel a tightness and just by smiling into the eyes there can be a softening and a relaxing, a smoothing of the brow. You can relax the habitual tightening of a jaw with similarly a slight smile. For many of us there's a chronic tension in the shoulders you might sense if you fill that area with awareness. If there can be a natural softening releasing let the hands be soft, allowing the chest to be open and softening right down through the belly. Perhaps feeling the contact points where your bottom is sitting on a cushion or chair, your hands are touching the your thighs are each other, the warmth pressure, your feet touching the floor. You can feel this whole body sitting here breathing. If you pay attention to your feet right now, you might sense is it that you have feet? Are you actually living inside your feet, inhabiting them? Notice what happens if you bring your whole attention and awareness inside the feet, the toes, the space between the top of the feet and the soles heels filling the feet with aliveness. Are you able to sense the tingling and the vibrating there, the space that the aliveness is floating in In a similar way, can you fill the legs with aliveness? Can you sense the length and the volume of the legs? Let awareness fill the legs, feeling the movement of energy. Can you fill the pelvic region with awareness, opening to the aliveness there space and aliveness. You might soften the belly again Letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath. And now this one. And again. Feeling awareness. Filling the whole abdominal cavity. Again an openness at the chest. And see if you can feel from the inside out the area of the heart. Are you aware of the vibrating and pulsing? Perhaps a squeeze or flow warms aliveness. Letting the shoulders be filled with awareness. Inhabiting the shoulders so you can allow whatever tightness or tension remains to float into. And awareness. Filling the length of the arms with awareness. Feeling the volume from the inside out, the movement of energy right down through the hands. Hands are very soft. And feeling them from the inside out. Tingling, vibrating. Floating in space. Sensing the cylinder of the neck filled with awareness. As if your throat could fill your neck. Aware of the tingling, vibrating flows of energy. There again that slight smile at the mouth, the jaw unhinged. You feel from the inside out the sensations of the mouth, gums, the teeth, tongue, the lips widening out to feel the whole face filled with sensation. The scalp, the skull, the brain. Since this whole body is a field of sensation, filled with space and aliveness. Feeling everything all at once, not stopping anything, not opposing anything. You might imagine the space that extends outward to either side, endlessly. Space behind you, in front of you, above and below, extending outward and outward, beyond the furthest stars. Can you imagine that? Outer space and this inner space as continuous space. Continuous space. Can you imagine that continuous space filled with the light of awareness. Suffused with awareness. Resting as awareness in this awake space. Allowing and including the changing flow of sound and sensation. Feelings, thoughts, all appearing and dissolving in this continuous space that's suffused with awareness. At some point there will be a noticing that the mind's drifted. And in those moments there's this opportunity to gently relax back. The pathway home back to this open awakefulness is a relaxing back again. Aware of the sounds that are right here. The aliveness and sensations right in this moment. Listening to and feeling the moment. Sensing the aliveness and the space it's happening in moment to moment. Sensing the quality of hereness. Being right here. Living presence, Continuous space. Suffused with the light of awareness. It we close with a simple prayer. May we come home to the light, love and aliveness that's our deep nature. May we live our lives from loving presence. May that loving presence ripple out in a way that brings peace and healing to our world. Namaste.