Keep Your Heart Open: Tools from Tara Brach

September feels like January. It is a hectic month for everyone I know, as the pace seems to have picked up dramatically from where we left off in relaxed August.  In Vancouver, where Head + Heart is headquartered, the rain started exactly on September 1, and hasn’t stopped.  A hard line drawn: summer is over.

Thankfully, when the seasons shift and/or times get extra hectic and we need more grounding in our lives, there are teachers like the wise Tara Brach. Tara Brach is a psychologist and meditation teacher we love. She teaches on how to remain grounded, no matter how busy things get.

Here, we’ve curated a few of  our favorite of Tara’s meditation talks, all of which we’ve found particularly helpful in busy times. If you want to learn how to feel grounded in your own body and heart, these are great pointers. Enjoy!

(Thank you, Tara, for allowing us to share these!)

Title: Being NOT Doing: If you feel like a bit of a machine, and don’t want to feel like a machine, this talk has a lot of wisdom to offer. Here, Tara Brach touches on the importance of true inner acknowledgements. To learn to see those old childhood wounds and give compassion to any stuck parts, so you can be free as an adult. This talk is an especially beautiful direction on sending compassion to one’s own heart.

Title: How to REALLY Listen: In a culture that demands to be heard, we just LOVED this talk about how to listen, and really listen well, with your whole heart. This in itself is a practice. The more we listen well, to others, and to our own selves, the more our innate inner wisdom can flow.

Title: How to Inhabit your own body. Fully. This short talk is about learning to inhabit your own body, as a path to sensing what you’ve been missing, your own open-heartedness. When there’s any pain or unpleasantness, we tend to want to flee our bodies, but this chat discusses why you might want to consider doing the opposite.

Let us know how these talks landed with you! We would love to hear from you.

About Tara Brach: Tara Brach’s teachings blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life, and a full, compassionate engagement with our world. The result is a distinctive voice in Western Buddhism, one that offers a wise and caring approach to freeing ourselves and society from suffering.

Explore lots of heart-opening events here.