Tara Brach Guided Meditation
In addition to this podcast episode, please enjoy our exclusive Tara Brach meditation called “Receiving Life” [15:59]. Tara leads you first through a joyful scan of the whole body part by part. She then invites you to experience the aliveness of the whole body at once and its connection to the space around you and to the earth. In this Tara Brach guided meditation, you’ll experience a greater awareness of body sensations and feelings. You will also explore how to bring that vivid embodiment into your daily activities.
Join Loch Kelly the creator of the mindful glimpses app here as he shares a deep dialogue with psychologist, meditation teacher and author, Tara Brach. Together they explore the path to awakening presence and deepening the connection to inner wisdom. The conversation navigates through practical techniques for shifting awareness, mindfulness cultivation, and the transformative power of embracing beliefs without being bound by them.
Discover how stories and narratives are portals to understanding stored emotions in the body and how practices like prayer, curiosity, and glimpses can lead to healing and a sense of belonging. The discussion also touches on the importance of celebrating joy, gratitude, and bliss in the journey toward freedom and self-realization.
[34:42] The episode features Loch offering a guided practice which is designed to explore Getting HeartMind Online. These mindful glimpses serve as invaluable tools for experiencing ways to access the awake consciousness that is already here within all of us.
Tara Brach Guided Meditation and More on the App
You can now explore all of Loch Kelly’s practices and teachings on the new Mindful Glimpses app. This innovative meditation and wellness app offers daily micro-meditations, step-by-step programs, and simple-yet-advanced tools for awakening. The app includes the above Tara Brach guided meditation along with guest meditations from other well-regarded teachers.
Tara Brach, a prominent figure in Western Buddhism, merges psychology and Eastern spirituality. With a background in psychology and political science, she explored yoga during grassroots organizing, later embracing Insight Meditation. Holding a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, she integrates mindfulness into psychotherapy. Through her podcast and global teachings, she emphasizes emotional healing, spiritual awakening, and compassionate action, addressing societal issues. Additionally, Tara authored the book ‘Radical Acceptance,’ now being re-released in its 20th Anniversary Edition. https://www.tarabrach.com/
Loch Kelly is the creator of the Mindful Glimpses app, award winning author, psychotherapist, and nondual meditation teacher known for his unique practical methods that support awakening as the next natural stage of human development. Backed by modern neuroscience and psychology, Loch introduces Effortless Mindfulness, an ancient form of nondual meditation that allows immediate access to our embodied awake nature which arises as calm, clarity, and compassion.
Connect with Loch:
Mobile App: https://lochkelly.org/mindful-glimpses
Website: https://lochkelly.org/
Donate: https://lochkelly.org/donate
The Effortless Mindfulness Podcast is brought to you by our 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity. Our mission is to make learning how to tap into your inner resources simple, teachable, and accessible to everyone.
Episode Transcript
Loch: Welcome to the Effortless Mindfulness Podcast. I’m Loch Kelly, and here I share talks and deep dialogues with leading experts in the field of meditation, psychology, and neuroscience. Together we’ll explore how everyday people, like you and me, can live an awakened life of clarity and compassion. You’ll also find micro meditations in every podcast episode.
If you want to try more of these, you can go to mindfulglimpses.com to download the new app, to experience immediate benefits because the love and peace we are all seeking is already here. Anywhere. Anytime. Enjoy.
Hi, and welcome everyone. It’s my great pleasure today to be here, dialoguing with my friend and colleague, Tara Brach.
Welcome Tara.
Tara: I feel really delighted to be with you, Loch.
PART 2
Tara: … Most of the liberating practice is undoing. It’s like having a clenched fist. And if you just bring awareness into the clenched fist, you don’t have to– there’s no self that has to unclench. There’s a natural, the muscles know how to do it.
Awareness knows how to wake up. We just need to pay attention. And I feel like the message for me behind what I’m listening to is that the more we get familiar with boundless awake awareness, it’s like every time there’s that glimpse. There is some place in us that knows that this is more true than any story or narrative ever. There’s a resonance of truth and the more Glimpses the more sense that not just I’m going to let go into awake awareness, but awake awareness is what I am. That keeps calling us.
And one of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of teachings is you refer to emptiness dancing, how there’s just this living dynamic. That there’s a kind of dry emptiness where there’s a sense of awake awareness. But it’s very vast. And there’s something really wonderful and yet there’s no tenderness.
What feels crucial is that we sense the awareness that is in and through our bodies. And it means really living and feeling from the inside out that awareness that’s in and through our bodies and through and around in every direction and that is continuous space that’s filled with the light of awareness, it’s whole.
And then when something comes up, there’s a natural tenderness in the response. It’s like the Tibetans talk about the three qualities of awareness as being that openness and that wakefulness, that knowing, and a natural tender responsiveness. And we don’t get that third quality unless we’re really embodied, inhabiting it.
So I feel like the more glimpses, and I want a name right here that I’m going to be the one to bring it up. Loch has a new app that is just wonderful. It’s just wonderful. It has all different pathways to glimpsing, to really sensing the larger truth of what we are, whether it’s a one minute practice or a longer practice.
So I just want to bow to you a lot because I know the amount of energy and what it takes, blood, sweat and tears to create an app. And it’s really wonderful.
Loch: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. It just felt like it’s the delivery system or the contact place that people need in the midst of a busy life. And that because it is already here they can do a glimpse and then what I call marinate, for longer periods of time, instead of meditate.
You just glimpse, recognize, realize, embody, feel open-hearted, and now turn off, put the phone away, now. But you have, now you’re given a short pointing and that’s been my interest like you is how to bring this into contemporary forms to translate not only the language from the cultures of contemplatives of all traditions, not just, from Western traditions as well as Eastern traditions.
And psychological traditions and neuroscience traditions of, freedom and joy and maturity as well and give tools that are experiential rather than just written supports. This is something that I felt would be a way to share with people so they could make it part of their lives wherever they are.
Yeah, so it’s fun. Yeah. As you say that, so I think that, and that’s how I set up. Like the intro course is natural calm is the first one, which is calm abiding shamatha, but different ways to do that. Then the second one is types of mindfulness, deliberate and effortless.
Then embodiment. And then I introduce a kind of way of doing this called local awake awareness. Which is a way to actually unhook and drop and have awareness know itself, both within and outside. Rather than efforting to do it or trying to imagine doing it. Then embodiment and what I’m calling their awake loving flow, which you and I have translated in 12 different ways because we want to try to get at it somehow, like open-hearted awareness. Ram Dass called it loving awareness.
You sometimes call it open-hearted presence. So there’s something there- or heart mind. Those three kind of moves from being introduced to mindfulness and which it unfolds naturally through Theravada insight, or to point to the pure awake awareness. And then to point to the nondual which in Buddhism. Nondual emphasis isn’t just nondual awareness, pure awareness. It’s actually the awareness that is not other than the aliveness.
So that’s the embodiment. It’s oh, they’re not two. That there’s what’s called in the Mahamudra, same taste or simultaneous mind. So this, and then what Thich Nhat Hanh so beautifully called interbeing. So that grounding, interbeing, interconnects us to everyone. Then the operating system. We don’t have to go back to create a thinker and a doer in order to be a calmer version of our small selves. But this heart mind or open-hearted awareness has that fullness or wholeness, as you say. So one of the glimpses is literally feeling how we’re identified or attached to thought.
Then, it’s like a small self riding a horse of our body looking out of our eyes. And then this local awareness, which is identified or attached, but is made of this spacious awareness can unhook and drop and know your jaw from within, your throat from within, and then feel completely embodied, and then find this heart mind or heart space that becomes the center.
It also drops to the Dantian, and to the legs, and to the feet, and to the ground as well, but is connected from, many people who this is a good match for. Many, some glimpses don’t work for everybody, but those who find it, it literally just: Oh, I’m home. This is… I’ve been trying so hard from here to get there by being here.
Tara: I think of it almost as probably 90 percent somatic. That investigates the most misunderstood step because so many people spiral into the kind of psychotherapy of the stories and I should have and he didn’t and know the beliefs that are there. It’s helpful to say, what am I believing right now?
Whenever we’re suffering, there’s a belief that’s keeping us identified. And to know that we can discover that belief, but we don’t have to believe our beliefs. We really don’t have to believe our beliefs. They’re, as I think it was, Tsokyni Rinpoche said, “they’re real, but they’re not true.”
Loch: That’s right. Real, but not true.
Yeah. And to see the layers of beliefs actually a portal back into the body. A lot of mindfulness teachings for years was, get out of the head and come into your body. But in a way, there was a bypass of stories that are part of the narrative. But they’re actually a portal to what’s stored in our body.
And if we try to step away from the stories of being abandoned or being betrayed or whatever it is, it’s harder to actually connect and be intimate with what’s alive and locked in our bodies.
Loch: Yes. Yeah, that’s right. Because the protective parts of us that are strong and often the ones rejected, are protecting something that we care about, something that’s deeply precious. So to be curious toward them and not even to transform negative emotions into positive, so even that transformational.
There’s some levels of that [that] are helpful. But ultimately the meeting of them, as the other I’s, ignorance and interconnected and innocent and interdependent. So the sense that what is the saying that being in a human body is the perfect vehicle for awakening because of the suffering.
So that it gives us that ability to see that it’s not two, that there isn’t a problem from love. And that doesn’t mean we’re not healing or we’re ignoring or we’re passive, that there is action and interaction. But that the untying of the knot or the detoxing process for everyone goes at a different pace. And certainly with our colleagues bringing forth trauma these days with, Gabor Maté and, The Body Keeps the Score with Bessel van der Kolk and others that it’s becoming.
So now the key is to bring to that is that the small self or the ego cannot handle trauma. No matter how smart or psychologically trained, the reason it’s repressed is because it can’t bear the unbearable. So it’s only by upgrading to forms of mindfulness and compassionate presence that isn’t just an attitude or another part that’s trying to be a polarized part. That’s just “I’m hurting. You shouldn’t be hurting. I feel compassionate towards you.” Okay, so who’s compassionate toward those two parts?
Oh, there we go.
Tara: Yeah, I am right there with you. With that story of what are you unwilling to feel, there’s an intelligence to being unwilling to feel when it’s trauma. There’s not enough of that authentic resourcefulness. And you’re describing it as really living from a more full sense of presence. Because it’s the presence/love that actually frees up the identity of a traumatized self.
Sometimes it takes for many people, because trauma is so much in the society. It’s in so many of our bodies. It takes a lot of emphasis on the practices that just create safety and love that really remind us of our belonging and actually not going right into where the pain is but really resourcing with ourselves and not alone.
That’s the power of connecting with others whether it’s a friend or a therapist or a healer. Or we now have Cloud Sangha which is an online community of mindful friends who just to explore this unfolding together, we need each other. It helps us realize that it’s not so personal. Which is some of the agony of it is feeling like this is happening to a separate self that’s deficient. And this trauma means I’m really broken.
And as soon as we, I’m able to say, “Wow. I go to a very deep place of angst about such and such.” It begins to heal because we enter that broader sphere that you were describing. But it takes some time of that resourcing to be ready and able.
Loch: Yeah, the sensitive human beings are often the ones who come to meditation as well. So they often have the sensitivity, they’re looking for a sensitive cure and salve.
So that gradual support and love and whatever works for different people. But certainly one of the things that has been held somewhat is the belief that the direct introduction to awake awareness shouldn’t be done until you are healed. Or it’s an advanced practice. But often I’ve found even working in outpatient clinics, in Brooklyn and the Bronx that, at the right timing, people do have access, even if they’ve had trauma and haven’t developed a strong ego. So they don’t have to get an ego.
Tara: I’m right there with you. Yeah. This is not like a progression where what’s always and already true, that loving awareness isn’t, and we’ve all had glimpses. And the more the better. It may be that when someone’s really stuck, they can’t follow a sequence that will enlarge them. That might be some of the traditional ways of disidentifying.
One of the things I found more and more with people that I teach and work with is the power of prayer. At times we’re very stuck in that separateness. And it’s– John O’Donohue that the poet and mystic says that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. And we all have this longing to belong.
It’s just part of our DNA. And if we get really in touch with it. Inhabit it in our body and feel the sincerity of it. And out of that place reach out towards a larger truth, a larger love. The power of that longing connects us. It’s like the longing is love calling us home is the way I think of it.
And you said so beautifully before, suffering is awareness sending the message that we’re stuck in something smaller than the truth. We’re in that cocoon and so prayer helps us to connect with a larger reality. And the beauty is it’s one of those practices that begins in a dualistic frame of mind and dissolves the duality.
I practice enough myself that I can with prayer know how if I’m feeling really small or I’m caught and being down on myself. And I’ll sense that prayer of, please love me. Please may I feel loved and held and belonging. Then the yearning actually opens me to there’s a. … One teacher put it, love is always loving you. There’s just love and there’s still a you for a little bit.
But as we let in that love, as we really let it just bathe us, we start discovering the awareness that is already inside and lit up and loving too. Then that sense of separateness from that loving awareness dissolves. So I really encourage people to experiment. It’s all an experiment.
When they’re caught in separateness, the different ways to bridge to a very heart experienced, opening sense of belonging.
Loch: Yes. Beautiful. Yeah. I think, it’s a very kind thing of you to bring that back in some ways. Because I think some of the secularization, particularly of Buddhism more than even yoga or other Eastern traditions, was to take out the religion and to make it more available for people who have actually had either traumatic religious experiences or were forced on them. Or there were other reasons that it wasn’t the best place. And they’re looking for something that’s simple and soothing and, working with their own consciousness.
But prayer or reaching out to something greater is in all Buddhist traditions. It’s also in secular traditions like recovery communities. Prayer, meditation, just call it power greater than yourself. Like whatever that is, it’s just not a resource with the source.
What’s that? And, say help or thank you. Or just open to nature and to the universe and to… But to not stay in and just meditate in and just try to do the work that doesn’t open to the mystery and to something that is undefinable but palpable once you find a way, especially people who are devotional types of people.
They need that so that it doesn’t, because you and I make sure they don’t do it to us. Because that’s the key. That’s one of, one of my main things. We’re not playing guru here. You’re the… it’s within you. And look bigger, or more in, or more out, and resource with community. Find that plugging in to something greater.
And, whether it’s talking or singing. Just feel that there’s a willing, an openness to something you don’t have to define.
Tara: And the beauty is as you open to it, there is a natural space of wisdom that reveals that there was no self there. It’s like it is part of dissolving that identification.
And I remember one teacher, it might have been Ramakrishna, but I can’t remember, said that If you can’t get rid of that self identity, then just dedicate it to love, to, dedicate. If you can’t get rid of the self identity, then cultivate gratitude, or devotion, or prayer, or being in nature, and just feeling, oh, I love, this is me, an expanded part of me, and that kind of bridging, then actually frees up the identification. So it’s a very cool pathway from dual to nondual.
Loch: Yeah, and it is that finding the love that’s greater than you that is who you essentially are. Yes. So it is, there’s the nondual. Yes. So it’s, and then you can actually say, then you can say, then you can feel, I am love. Oh, I don’t need to get love’s already here. Because it’s not love with a small l or a type of love. But it’s the love that you didn’t… it’s the unconditional love, the unconditioned love.
Tara: Yeah. As you say that I’m so aware that for so many people, as soon as they touch into that more of that sense of freedom, there’s a tendency to then move right on to the next thing. And neuroscience is such a support in this talking about how for a realization to really stick, for it to be really deep and pervading. We need to actively install it, spend 15 to 30 seconds, just attending to, oh, this, the is-ness that’s, just learning to stay some.
And that’s what creates the familiarity. So whether it’s through gratitude or through that bridging of love or prayer. Or whether it’s through a guided glimpse that you do, it’s that intentional getting familiar getting curious. What is this like? Curiosity is, oh my gosh, there’s the twin pathways of curiosity, loving the truth and loving love.
And we all have our, we all have both and we sometimes lead with one or lead with the other. And I’ll share with you, I was just with a very dear friend who’s probably got a week or two to live, maybe three. Roland Griffiths, who’s very known as a pioneer in psychedelics.
Loch: Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah.
Tara: So we just, I had the honor and privilege of about three and a half hours with him a few days ago. And here’s this person who is on his way out and yet utterly curious about the whole passing. And it’s like there’s unpleasantness going on. Just as you said, you don’t have to get rid of the unpleasantness.
It’s just that his curiosity keeps on linking him to a larger space of gratitude and wakefulness and openness so that there’s a profound quality of acceptance that’s you know, when I’m with him, there’s a part of me saying so what can I learn more about, facing death close up? And wow, curiosity.
Loch: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, that’s so amazing. His work is so important, I think, for so many people. And having also been with people who are passing, just walking in the room is such a sacred experience. There’s like a… with most people, sometimes it can be very agitated, but it’s very full of something. Sometimes people are early on clinging, but others who have started that process are opening.
I’ve spent some time with my mother, four years ago, who had a stroke and then was in the hospital. My wife and I slept in the small one person hospital bed next to her over the night. And we just hold her hand and talk to her. Then we were there with my brother and sister-in-law just talking and laughing. And Paige, my wife, just said: there!
We looked over and she took that final breath. Then we just all gathered around her and just thanked her and prayed and spent this time. So you know and the thing is, she lived a good life. She lived a full life. That’s all, you know. I feel like I don’t know what would happen if tomorrow, but I feel – for me – it’s dessert now.
It’s if it’s, if it were time, I would hope, like Roland, I could face it, because, the now is so eternal. I don’t know if that just sounds like a… Hopefully that doesn’t sound like a card. But it literally is, that’s the preciousness of having been, yeah, like you’re saying. It’s a very great fortune tobe with people at that time. People talk about the birth of babies, but this is the other birth, right?
Tara: It is, and this has been a year of it for me. I just keep noticing that as the body is passing, there’s this transparency that happens. And it’s much easier to sense the truth of what you said, that timeless spirit. That is, is living through. I tell myself, as my body is doing its aging things that okay, the body’s going down. But the awareness is waking up and it’s a trade off. But I’ll go for awareness.
There’s a great Bhutanese saying that if you want to be happy, contemplate death five times a day. I think it means the death of the moments as much as anything else. That the more we feel like, okay, you and I are together right now. And then this particular encounter will pass. And sensing the comings and goings allows us to tap into the mystery that is utterly still and eternal, and present. It is a gift. And it is a beautiful training, to tend towards death in that way.
Loch: Yeah, and I’m just called back to something you were saying before. It’s bringing these together, what you would call the fullness of – samsara and nirvana would be one way to say it. But that we had the great good fortune of stumbling into this gift of this world of meditation, consciousness, and psychology and healing that, when we speak, I just, some people, as you say oh, I don’t feel that.
I don’t want that. I’m in pain. That’s too hard. That’s too difficult… I was there too, that was, I’m still, I still have certainly fullness of experience and, bring it on. It goes through a detox process that, I can remember just a couple of years ago, just sitting at a table with a friend and just starting to shake. And then feel all this fear and he was like, what’s going on? I said, Oh, it’s nothing personal. And I was like, what am I saying? And then I said, wait a minute. What it is… something’s moving through something shaking and baking here. I’m just sitting here with you letting it happen and I’m not even tracking how early it is or whether it has something or how it got triggered.
And not sure, but it’s clearing through. Then there is, like you said about neuroscience, they say that emotions in the neurons is what takes experiences and embodies them. So that’s why trauma or negative experiences get bound in the body. So the importance of bliss, for me, is really important, or, bliss, you could say, is a form of love.
You could say bliss, you could say joy, loving kindness, but that, even relief, even ah. Letting that not be a passing okay, that good, that was nice, now let’s go do something. But letting it, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, marinate the body in open-hearted awareness, and let the bliss go. Follow it back to the essential bliss, or the unconditional love, which now it’s become more. It’s not like the passing bliss with a small ‘b.’
It is in some ways. But it’s like that most intense bliss in the body spread out thinly throughout the universe. It’s not that everyone can experience that. But when there’s moments, so again, that’s why I call [them] glimpses. So glimpse is not a meditation state.
It’s not an experience, and it’s not a positive experience. It’s actually a shift from the openness to be aware, have recognition of the awareness, to realization that I am the awareness that’s embodied. And then it’s recognizing itself. The glimpse is, oh, this new intelligence is aware of itself being here with whatever’s happening.
I’m not doing it.
Tara: Taking that with me, especially the part of the bliss spreading out thinly through the universe. I’m going to go with that ride.
Loch: That’s good. But it does get the, it is the important. Because there is some kind of almost a little, can be a Puritan quality to some of the Buddhist practice. So it can be a little, and there’s a need, just that, from the over activeness to, okay, just sit still. Okay I want to get up. Okay, just sit a little. There’s a little discipline here, but then it’s leading to freedom and dancing and joy and…
Tara: We need to celebrate.
Thich Nhat Hanh said that it’s not enough to suffer. You have to touch peace also. And that includes love, gratitude, joy, wonder. We need it. It’s part of who we are. It’s more that we have conditioning to focus on the negative. So we need to undo that conditioning by just what you’re saying, attending to the sweetness.
Loch: Having a colleague who’s like-minded and like-hearted is such a gift. So I really thank you, and honor you, and all you do.
Tara: It’s a pleasure to walk together, dear.
Loch: Such a delight. Thank you.
Glimpse Practice
So our usual habit is to be in our heads, working from conceptual thinking and dualistically perceiving that we’re a subject and an object. When we’re able to shift and unhook from our thinking mind, we can drop into our body and discover awake awareness and our senses. As we do, we’ll be able to realize that there’s another kind of intelligence that’s often called heart mind or open-hearted awareness.
And that this is a non-conceptual intelligence. So let’s feel what it’s like to shift from head to heart. To shift from conceptual thinking to non-conceptual awareness. In order to do this, we’re going to unhook local awareness from thought, and have it drop down below our neck. So find a comfortable way of sitting.
You can have your eyes open or closed. Take a deep breath. And just notice the activity in your mind and your brain. Notice that awareness is there and aware of thinking. And now, simply unhook local awareness from thought and have it begin to slowly move down through your neck. As local awareness unhooks, it is where knowing is happening.
So feel that you are knowing directly from within your throat and then like an invisible bubble. Local awareness can move down into your upper body and find a location where local awareness is aware of both sensation and awareness.
Check and see that you’re not looking up to thought to know and you’re not looking down from your head to know what’s going on in the middle of your chest. Awareness is unhooked. It has moved like an invisible bubble, like a balloon down to the middle of your body. Feel that it’s comfortably knowing from there. Now feel as if from this open-hearted awareness, there’s an intention to treat this bubble or balloon as if it’s a balloon of intelligence that’s buoyantly filled with air and is resting in the water of your body.
Just keep the knowing sense down from its habit of going back up to the head. Apply the easiest intention. Just as if your hand were on a balloon filled with air that’s in the water. So you keep it halfway in the water. Feel the habit of it going back up toward your head toward thinking. And yet you let the center of intelligence remain there.
Down within your heart.
Stay there. Don’t look to thought to know. Look to awareness and then awareness can know thoughts that are coming and going. Feel that awareness is knowing without referencing thought. Feel the kind of knowing of this non conceptual awareness. What it’s like to bring the heart mind online, to break the habit of orienting by thought. Just a gentle feeling of retraining intelligence.
You can have the feeling of saying stay, stay. Playful, but intelligent. And intentional so that now you just allow yourself to feel what this new knowing is like.
There’s a not-knowing by not going to thought. But then there’s a new knowing, a not-knowing that knows that comes online that is connected to a different level of mind to a different place of consciousness.
See what this is like to stay balanced inside and out. Just resisting that pressure to go back up, that magnet to pull you back to thinking. To locate yourself in your head behind your eyes. If you go up just return. And bring a little intentional playful retraining to this globe of awareness that is your open-hearted heart-mind. Remain and retrain. Stay, stay, stay.
And know.
Enjoy.
Thanks for listening. This podcast is offered freely. If you’ve enjoyed this, please download the free trial of our new app at mindfulglipses.com. There, we offer daily micro meditations and in-depth programs to support your awakening.
