Tara Brach - Guided Meditation: Loving This Life - Happiness - Metta (17:05 min.)

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

This guided meditation, grounded in the practice of Metta, invites us to awaken the heart by softening the body and quieting the mind. We begin with the simple image of a smile—opening to warmth, ease, and presence. With a tender attention, we rest with breath, sensations, and sound—gently returning when the mind drifts. As we offer loving phrases like "May I feel happy" and "May I be free," we nourish a deep sense of well-being and connection, embracing this life with compassion and an open heart.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. The attitude that really supports us in presence is one of friendliness, this quality of saying yes regarding whatever's arising with a quality of kindness, with care. It can be helpful to begin a meditation by sensing the curve and shape of a smile.

And you might sense sky, great open sky, with a smile filling the space of the sky, and let your mind merge with that, with that great open sky. So you can feel your mind filled with a, that benevolence, that receptivity of a smile, sensing smile spread through the eyes. So the eyes soften.

Sense a slight smile at the mouth. Let the inside of the mouth be smiling. So there's softening or relaxing of the jaw. You might sense the curve of a smile spreading through the heart and the chest area. Not to cover over but to make space for what is here. You can sense the heart, the tenderness of heart floating and the space. space of a smile, letting the chest be open, feeling the shoulders free to relax a bit, a kind of melting or dissolving from the inside out in the shoulders, letting go, the arms hanging easily,

the hands soft, feeling with that openness of the torso, the chest that you can relax down through the stomach area, softening the belly, letting the breath be received deep in the torso. Still sensing that smile, the eyes, the mouth, the heart, smiling in the belly. Just loosening, letting there be some space, feeling the aliveness there. Letting the sense of aliveness, awareness spread down through the legs. Feeling the feet from the inside. Widening the attention to feel this whole body, this energy body, this living, dancing, energy body. field of sensation, free to move, express in the space of a smile,

in that allowing open space, that field of awareness, feeling the dancing sensations, tingling, vibrating, pressure, openness, flow, heat, cool, including in that open receptive awareness, the sounds that come and go, listening, listening to and feeling the whole moment, sensing the quality of presence, of heerness. For some you might find that you can stabilize in this presence by very carefully sensing the inflow and outflow of the breath in the foreground, still aware of the whole dance of experience that's going on. For others, letting sounds be primarily in the foreground can help you to remain here or to come back easily when you leave. So sensing a home base

if it helps, the breath, sounds, maybe the sensations of the body sitting here. Letting your practice be very simple tonight, noticing when you leave presence when you can. just choosing to be here, inviting yourself back into this moment, listening to these sounds, opening receptively to this swim of sensation, letting yourself be attached to receive these feelings in the heart, noticing what's happening and saying yes in the most radical and energetic way possible, allowing what's here. Give yourself permission to start fresh whenever it might be helpful. You might simply open the attention again to sound.

Just listen. You might relax through the body, perhaps sensing a slight smile at the mouth. Just feeling that quality of gentleness, relaxing the shoulders, softening the hands, relaxing the heart, and with a receptive inner listening,

just to notice what's going on, the experience of this moment. Just receive it energetically with a yes, noticing if the mind has drifted without judgment, with friendliness, just inviting yourself right here, seeing if it's possible to relax just a little bit more. exploring in these last few minutes the offering of the loving-kindness prayer to ourselves, just in a very simple way, feeling your own body, feeling your heart, just offering the words, may I feel happy? And imagining and sensing what that means to you, might be that you feel the smile a bit again, that there's some color, some image, some feeling in the body. May I feel happy?

May I feel safe and at ease? Just whispering that to yourself and imagining, visualizing, and feeling what that means to you. May my heart and mind feel and be free. Again, imagining, visualizing, sensing, freedom, and a cellular way. way. You might imagine the heart-mind of an awakened being, just filling you, permeating every part of your being, that radiance, that aliveness, that lucidity. May I be free, awake and free. May I feel happy. May I feel safe and at ease. May this heart and mind be free, awake and free.