Tara Brach - Meditation: Gladdening the Mind (18:31 min)

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

The Buddha taught that one of the most powerful ways to begin meditation is by gladdening the mind—remembering what we love, resting in gratitude, and opening to the goodness that is already here. In this guided meditation, I invite you to awaken a gentle smile throughout the body and heart, allowing appreciation, ease, and spacious awareness to naturally emerge. Together we'll explore how a simple shift toward gratitude can soften habitual contraction, calm the nervous system, and reconnect us with the aliveness of the present moment. As awareness opens like the vast sky, we discover that beneath the changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and sensations is an awake, loving presence that is always here. In this meditation you'll explore: Resting in the stillness and openness of true awareness How gratitude helps settle and gladden the mind Relaxing the body through the felt sense of a smile Opening to spacious, embodied awareness Returning from mental busyness to present-moment presence Whether you're new to meditation or an experienced practitioner, this practice invites you to come home to the peace, presence, and loving awareness that is your true nature.

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. The Buddha taught that as part of arriving, settling, entering any meditation or anything in our lives,

the value of gladdening the mind, in many ways to remember what we're forgetting, remember in some ways what we love. I'd like to invite you to begin by taking some moments to reflect on whatever you feel most grateful for. Reflect on what you love. And as something, some experience comes to mind, take some moments to let the good feelings that come with that be felt,

you felt sense in the body. Let yourself entrain some, really. rest in that, soak it in, feel it, sensing what it's like to have the experience of appreciation, really spread through the body, mind and being. And you can deepen that as we've practiced some together with the image and the felt sense of a smile. You might imagine the great open sky around us filled with the curve and the sense of a smile, a vast smile, sensing that openness of space and a smile filling it, and then letting that smile spread through the mind, letting the mind can emerge with that great sky, so your mind is filled

with the curve and the felt sense of a smile, letting the smile spread through the eyes, lifting the outer corner slightly. It's a natural softening, awakening, letting the brow be smooth, letting the jaw be unhinged, a slight smile at the mouth, and telling the inside of the mouth smiling, noticing the whole play of sensations to the area of the lips, tongue, gums, teeth. You might visualize and sense a smile spreading through the throat area. Just sense the space that's there, at ease, receptive, aware of the sensations, the aliveness, the space, and the throat. Again, sensing the eyes, soft and smiling, because we tend to re-contract so quickly. The mouth, the throat,

and sensing a smile spreading through the chest area, smiling into the heart, letting a smile fill that whole region of the chest so that you can sense into the space that's there, the aliveness it's there, letting the sense of spaciousness spread out so that the shoulders are free to relax back down some, back and down, falling away from the shoulders. Hands resting easily.

You might soften the hands and feel the aliveness there. Still sensing now an openness to the chest and then softening down, relaxing, loosening through the abdominal area. And again, you might let the visual image and the felt sense of a smile spread through the belly, gently receiving the breath deep in the torso, intimate attention to the sensations, the space inside the belly, and scanning down to the pelvic region again with this image and felt sense of a smile spreading through, filling the pelvic region, noticing the capacity to really open to sensation, to sense the space and aliveness.

there, aware of the length and the volume of the legs, and the awareness inside the feet, the movement of sensation there, and widening the lens so that you can receive this whole body as a field of sensation, letting everything happen, including in awareness the play of sound, listening to and feeling the whole moment. in the foreground of this changing play of sound, sensation, feelings, and also aware of the space that it's all happening in, that background of formless, awake space. To take what the Zen teachers call the backwards step is to simply the relax back and

be that wakeful openness that includes and perceives this changing, arising, dissolving life, discovering how awareness perceives sensations, that awake stillness that receives, that receives the changing experience of tingling and vibrating movement of life, discovering how this open awareness perceives sound, the vast silence that's listening, the silence that listens to the thoughts. Noticing that the mind has contracted and been in the shape of a thought form is really the beginning of waking up, an opportunity to become more skilled and homecoming. The mind's been inside a thought as you start recognizing that it's like an airplane that's been inside a cloud, coming out of the cloud and sensing clouds

are still there but you're aware of the whole sky, the whole reality of what's here. You can consciously reopen and reawaken the senses again, listening, perhaps relaxing through the body, letting go in the shoulders a bit, softening the hands, and you're letting, the awareness inside the chest, the belly, reestablishing that embodied wakefulness. And as you're feeling this body, this breathing body, also including in the background the sense of the awareness that's here, the very presence that is perceiving.

Full presence includes both the sky, the background, and the bird. moment to moment a relaxed attentiveness.