Pt1 - Releasing the Habits That Imprison Your Spirit - Addictions of all levels of intensity arise from disconnection and are spiking globally. Humans are experiencing epidemic levels of loneliness, and this combined with engineered products and substances that are highly addictive leads to great suffering. In these two talks, we explore how we get hooked on behaviors that we know cause harm, and how mindfulness and self-compassion can serve our freedom. Key to this process is reconnecting with ...
May 11, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Receiving This Life in Awareness - In our everyday life we are conditioned to feel that life is happening to us, or that we are the doer. This meditation deconditions that self-centrality by bringing attention to the aliveness in our bodies, and then opening to receive the entire play of sounds, sensations and feelings in awareness....
May 11, 2023•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Radical Acceptance – Gateway to Love, Wisdom and Peace - Acceptance is radical because it undoes our resistance to reality. This talk explores how our meditation practice can cultivate a liberating acceptance, a heartspace that includes all of life and enables us to respond to our world with deep intelligence and compassion. all life.
May 04, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Embodying Acceptance and Care - 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 poet, Dorothy Hunt, “Peace is this Moment Without Judgment.”
May 04, 2023•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cultivating Loving Kindness – Seeing the Goodness - The ground of loving kindness is seeing the basic goodness in ourselves, each other and our world. This is what gives rise to pure appreciation, friendliness, love and the felt-sense of belonging. In this talk we explore what obscures and contracts our perceptual field, and the pathway of purposefully awakening this transformational capacity of cherishing all life.
Apr 27, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Embodied Spirit - Experiencing our aliveness through our senses is the gateway to resting in formless loving presence. This meditation guides us to awakening through our body, and recognizing the backdrop of silence, of awake awareness, that is the source of all being....
Apr 27, 2023•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Realizing True Nature: A conversation with Hameed Ali and Tara Brach - Hameed Ali is an author, spiritual teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. In this interview we explore ways of approaching awakening to who we are, and look at the importance of befriending the experience of separate self, and actively investigating the blocks - our contracted sense of identity - that obscure the goodness and love of our true nature. Our time weaves in the inspiration of Hameed’s mos...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Inhabiting Awake Awareness - This meditation begins with collecting attention with the breath, and awakens us to the experience of aliveness and inner space by scanning the body. We then open to receive all the senses in awake awareness, and to inhabiting that boundless receptive awareness that is our home....
Apr 20, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World - Part 1 - This week, I began a two-part series inspired by Pema Chödron's newest offering, How We Live is How We Die . It's a powerful book that I highly recommend! One of our deepest inquiries is how to find happiness and peace in an inherently insecure world. In these talks, we'll explore the ways we habitually try to control our lives, and the practices of presence that allow us to cherish this living world and find freedom in the midst of chang...
Apr 13, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World - Part 2 - Last week, I began a two-part series inspired by Pema Chödron’s newest offering, How We Live is How We Die . It’s a powerful book that I highly recommend! One of our deepest inquiries is how to find happiness and peace in an inherently insecure world. In these talks, we’ll explore the ways we habitually try to control our lives, and the practices of presence that allow us to cherish this living world and find freedom in the midst of chang...
Apr 13, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Living Presence - The pathway to experiencing full aliveness and openheartedness is by awakening awareness throughout the body. This meditation begins by establishing a rhythmic inflow and outflow of the breath, in order to calm and collect the mind. Then continuing with the conscious breathing, we are guided through the body - bringing attention to sensations and space. This attention becomes a very vibrant living presence, and we end by experiencing that living presence as a natura...
Apr 13, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Vast and Timeless Presence - The pathway to inhabiting our full presence is including, with mindfulness all parts of experience. This guided meditation explores how we can open, without resistance to the changing flow of sensations, feelings, thoughts and sounds, and discover the boundless awareness that is our true home.
Apr 06, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Power of Deep Listening – Part 2 - Listening deeply is the gateway to realizing connection. It’s what allows us to move through life with a wise, loving and healing presence. These two talks explore our blocks to true listening, and offer teachings and practices that can directly cultivate this invaluable capacity.
Mar 30, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Cultivating Deep Listening - Deep listening expresses the purity and presence of our true nature. This meditation guides us to come into a state of listening that is spacious, receptive and profoundly wakeful and present. We close with the poem “lost” by David Wagoner....
Mar 30, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Power of Deep Listening – Part 1 - Listening deeply is the gateway to realizing connection. It’s what allows us to move through life with a wise, loving and healing presence. These two talks explore our blocks to true listening, and offer teachings and practices that can directly cultivate this invaluable capacity.
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Aliveness and Presence - This meditation guides us to wake up our senses and full aliveness through a body scan, and then to rest in the formless presence that is aware of this changing dance of life. We close with a poem by Robert Hall....
Mar 23, 2023•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Compassion for All Living Beings - We often talk of widening the circles of compassion. This talk explores the qualities of mature compassion, what blocks us from this embodied and inclusive caring, and how each of us can awaken a heart that responds to our world’s suffering.
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Say “Yes” to Life - This guided practice awakens a relaxed and friendly attention that rests in the breath and opens to whatever is arising. We deepen that presence with the intention to truly say “Yes” to experience, allowing life to be just as it is....
Mar 16, 2023•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Wings of Awakening – Self-Honesty & Love (retreat talk) - We evolve our consciousness by bringing a clear and kind attention to the tangles of suffering. This talk explores how the “second arrow” of self-judgment imprisons us in emotional reactivity, and the pathways of awakening awareness that reconnect us with our full human potential. (This talk was given at the 2016 IMCW fall silent retreat.)
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Spacious Sky of Awareness - This meditation begins with a body scan that enables us to awaken our senses. We relax open fully to include the changing flow of sounds and sensations, in a spacious, open awareness. (from a morning on the 2015 New Year's silent retreat)...
Mar 09, 2023•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Making the Whole World Your Friend - A wonderful translation of the Pali word Metta is friendliness. This talk looks at friendliness through an evolutionary lens, and explores ways we can cultivate a more open heart.
Mar 02, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Befriending Your Inner Life - This meditation establishes a gentle and caring presence through bringing the image and felt sense of a smile to various domains in the body. We then settle with the breath, and practice relaxing with whatever arises, letting life be just as it is. The underlying intention is to regard all experience with a clear, interested and friendly attention. The gift is a homecoming to our naturally loving presence....
Mar 02, 2023•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Refuge in the Wilderness - Pt2 – Coming Home to Embodied Presence - When we live from our mental control towers , we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and the sacred presence that underlies all lived experience....
Feb 23, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Homecoming to Our Life Breath - Perhaps the most universal place to collect and deepen attention is the breath. This meditation begins with an intentional breath that calms the nervous system, and then opens to a clear, intimate presence with our natural breathing. With breath as our home base, we practice returning again and again when the mind becomes distracted. As presence grows, we can let the breath be in the foreground, and include whatever waves of life come and go. This brin...
Feb 23, 2023•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Refuge in the Wilderness - Part 1 - When we live from our mental control towers, we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and the sacred presence that underlies all lived experience.
Feb 16, 2023•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Opening to Full Aliveness - This meditation includes relaxing and awakening through the body, widening the lens to include sound and then letting life live through us, receiving all that arises in open awareness....
Feb 16, 2023•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast The RAIN of Forgiveness - The capacity to release the armoring of hatred and blame is intrinsic to our evolving consciousness. This talk explores the process of authentic forgiveness, and how we can use the mindfulness-based tool of RAIN to heal and free our hearts.
Feb 09, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Vipassana – Practice of Seeing Clearly - Vipassana, also known as insight meditation, is training in bringing a clear mindful attention to our moment-to-moment experience. We begin by relaxing through the body and then resting attention with the breath – or some other sensory anchor – and allowing the mind to settle. Then we open to whatever is predominant or calling our attention – sensations, emotions, sounds – meeting each arising experience with a clear, kind attention. The gift ...
Feb 09, 2023•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast How to Stop the War Against Yourself - A conversation with Tara Brach & Dan Harris - It’s possible to actually be addicted to self-criticism, especially as a way to keep yourself safe. But evidence shows that rather than safety, this pervasive habit in our society creates deep suffering. This conversation between Tara and Dan Harris dives into strategies to deal with your own self-hatred and cultivate a forgiving heart. (Note: This was initially created as an episode for 10% Happier Podcast)...
Feb 02, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Meditation: Opening to the River of Aliveness - This meditation guides us to awaken to sensation using the image of a smile and scanning through the body. We then open to sound and to the entire changing flow of experience. When we connect with the changing flow of sensations, feelings and sounds, we also discover the formless awareness that is our Source… and home.
Feb 02, 2023•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
