Tara Brach - Guided Meditation: Remembering Your Spiritual Heart

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

During times of great collective stress, it's common to get gripped by waves of anxiety and fear. This guided meditation, an adaptation of the Tibetan tonglen practice, helps us reconnect with our spiritual heart, the sea of love and light that can hold even the most painful waves in our lives.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Greetings. Namaste, friends. Most are aware, this is a season of huge collective fear, distress. For many, the focus is on the elections here in the United States, and it's broader. It's the violence and suffering in our world.

So our emotions are natural, they're intelligent, and when we're caught in the grip of fear, which happens a lot for people in these days, it's because we have forgotten a larger sense of our belonging, our shared belonging to loving, awake awareness. So this guided meditation, it's an adaptation of the Tibetan tonguelin practice, it can help us remember and reopen to our shared spiritual heart. So let's begin together finding a comfortable way of sitting, sitting so you're tally or feeling alert and also at ease. and you can either close your eyes or perhaps lower your gaze so that the attention naturally goes inward. And we'll start with the simplicity of breathing consciously together. So feel the movement of the breath.

And you might extend the in-breath. Extend it so that it's really a long, deep, full in-breath, filling the chest in the lungs. hold for a moment and then a slow out breath let it be a slow smooth release of the breath so you can feel the sensations of the breath leaving the nostrils and then inhaling again nice long deep full in breath slow smooth out breath letting go let him go and again a nice deep full breath, slow out breath. Be aware of releasing the breath, of relaxing outward, letting go, letting go. And one more time, inhaling deeply, slow release, softening down the length of the body as you let go of the breath. And then as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm,

just feel the quality of presence that's right here. You might just be just, you might just gently scan through the body and sense what might want to let go a little more right now. Feel the face. Let the eyes soften. Let the brow be smooth. Look the jaw unhinge. Since the tongue can fill the lower palate, allowing the shoulders to fall away from the neck. And feel the shoulders from the inside out. and sense how the presence of awareness inside the shoulders can help in a natural softening, loosening, let the hands rest in an easy, effortless way, and feel inside the hands. Sense that you can soften and notice the aliveness inside the hands, tingling, vibrating, let the chest be open,

allowing this next breath to be received in a softening belly. This breath, and now this one, and again, sensing awareness filling the whole body down through the legs, the feet, the arms, the hands, the torso. So you can feel the body as a field of sensation. Imagine and sense this larger body of our earth, and the earth's aliveness flow. going into you, filling you, increasing that sense of vitality, aliveness, belonging to the earth. And now widening further to sense this earth, the sense the living beings on this earth, all of us humans on this earth.

And imagine the humans living right here in your country and on different continents. and how many are caring right now about this world? Feeling how much suffering there is, feeling concerned for the future, and trying in their own ways to help. How many are caring, including yourself, loving this life, wanting to protect life, those who are young and old, caring,

people from different races, religions, languages, so many caring. And imagine back through history how many humans caring always at all times. Humans wanting to bring comfort and healing to others, to bring healing to their communities, to make this world a better place, and imagine future generations. Around the world, how many caring beings, future generations, humans wanting to hold hands with others and bring more loving, more healing to our world. Sense this, past, present, future as a boundless field of caring, of life, loving life,

and your own spiritual heart belonging to that field, knowing the truth of your caring, the goodness of caring. From that awareness, invite forward now the emotions that are carried in your human body and heart. And you might, if you're comfortable with it, let your hand rest gently on your heart, just connecting with what's inside you. and take some moments to remind yourself of what you fear, let the particulars be here, allowing yourself to feel the feelings that are here. Perhaps with the help of the breath, you might breathe in to feel fully and connect

with what you're actually experiencing. so letting what's unfolding in the world be right here for you, feeling the feelings of it, and breathing in and letting yourself touch whatever's coming up in you. And you might name the feeling. Perhaps it's fear or aversion or anger, distress, despair. with each in breath, allowing yourself to be touched by the realness, the rawness of whatever's arising inside you, breathing in, being touched. And as you breathe out, there's space for this,

breathing in and being touched by whatever feelings are here, letting yourself feel fully, and breathing out, sensing their space. As the feelings become increasingly full, begin to sense that you're breathing them out into the heart of the world, into a boundless field of caring, of loving, that holds our lives. So you're breathing in and feeling your human emotions,

your human heart. and breathing out into spiritual heart space. Breathing in, feeling the emotions, the rawness, the pain, breathing out into spiritual heart space, as if you're surrendering a river of pain into a sea of loving, continuing to breathe in and feel exactly what's here. Feel the throat, the chest, the belly, breathing in, willing to contact the life that's here, and breathing out, sensing you're releasing

into a boundless field of loving, into spiritual heart space. You might sense it as letting a stormy cloud dissolve into great sky, their space. Continuing to feel the movement of the breath, bring to mind all the others. all the others who feel this human pain that you're feeling, the fears or aversion, the despair, so that you're breathing in for all of us, breathing in and letting yourself be touched by this collective pain and breathing out, offering it out into the heart of the world.

There's space. There's space. You can trust that. breathing in for all of us, letting yourself be touched by the collective fears and pain, and breathing out into the shared heart space that holds our lives, sensing as you continue to breathe that you are this heart space, this spiritual heart space that's vast, luminous, tender. You're the heart space that's holding, this hurting precious life, that this is more the truth of who we are, this loving awareness

than any story of separateness who are the heart space holding this living world. And knowing that the more we trust our shared belonging, the more our lives, our human lives, our thoughts, our words, our actions will help serve the healing of our human lives. our world. We become a human expression of loving awareness. So before closing, just sensing all of us, different continents, breathing together, caring, let this be a refuge. Our spiritual heart is here, now and always. Namaste, friends, and much love.