Tara Brach - Remembering Our True Home (15:44 min.)

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

In this guided meditation, we turn attention inward and come into intimate presence with the life that is here. Beginning with the body, breath and sensations, we gradually open into the spacious awareness that holds all experience. As we soften habitual tension and allow thoughts, emotions and sensations to arise and pass, we discover the tender wakefulness that is always here. Like waves held by the ocean, our changing experiences belong to awareness but do not define who we are. As we close, we are invited to rest in that open, loving presence—and to remember that beneath the changing forms of our lives, awake awareness is our true home. This meditation is especially supportive for: ✨ Relaxing physical and emotional tension ✨ Cultivating embodied mindfulness and presence ✨ Meeting difficult emotions with tenderness ✨ Resting in open awareness ✨ Remembering our shared belonging and essential nature   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Let's take some moments to tune in consciously in a formal practice way. Wherever you are, you might find the way of the posture that you feel best support you. And once you've taken the position, as they say, come into stillness and turn the attention inward. it's that you turn from outer experience to that simple inquiry, you know, what's happening inside me right now. And the follow-up inquiry is, and can I be with this? So just begin that noticing of the life inside. And as the attention is turned inward, you might intentionally sweep through the body with a gentle

kind of scan, sensing the possibility of relaxing wherever there's been a habitual tightening. And I often like to start with my eyes because it's very subtle, but when there's tension in the body, the little micro muscles around the eyes contract. Our head gets tight. So, smoothing the brow, softening the eyes. If it helps you to imagine that gentle curve of a smile spreading through the eyes, you might do that. To the outer corners are lifted a bit. Let the face be soft. You can relax the jaw, slight smile at the mouth, maybe feeling the inside of the mouth smiling.

that helps to release tension, allowing the scan to move down into the throat and the neck and the shoulders. And first, just notice if there's tension there. Usually we carry a lot in that region and let it soften by just sensing the space around it, allowing the shoulders to fall away from the neck, even slightly. relaxing back and down. And again, feeling from the inside a kind of intimate presence

that can begin to sense a movement of sensation, a loosening, and let the arms rest in an easy way, the hands relaxed and easy so that if you bring the attention inside the hands, again there can be a kind of natural softening as the awareness builds inside the hands. Notice how much sensation you can detect. This is really a practice of intimacy with the life that's right here. Let there be an openness to the chest and again inside out feeling that region of the heart and the lungs.

notice if there's any constriction and letting it float in awareness. Life naturally unfolds and untangles in the space of awareness, scanning downward into the abdominal area and see if you can let this next breath be received in a softening belly, this breath, and now this one. So as the awareness fills the abdominal area, you can allow again that softening. Moving through the pelvic, genital area, the hips, the buttocks.

Just as a cup can be filled with water, this whole body can be filled with awareness, down through the legs, the feet, so that you can sense as you widen the attention. that this body is a field of living sensation, boundary. No real center. If you continue to widen or open, you can include the arising and passing of sound, boundary or center. In hand, open, awake space that's listening,

that's listening to and feeling. the changing moment. Noticing the thoughts that come, sensing that they can pass, that they're happening in an open space of awareness. Noticing that if you bring attention to the heart, if you bring attention to any area of tension or emotional tightness, that it can be experienced as held by that field of awareness,

that there's room, that that space is tender, inherently tender, taking some moments to rest in that open, tender awareness, just letting whatever's here arise and pass. Notice how if anything arises, that's sticky, charged. If you meet it with the quality of yes, allowing it, offering tenderness that deepens and enlarges the space that can be with what arises.

You might sense how, like an ocean, the awake awareness, the tender space is the truth of who you are. That includes the passing waves, but is not defined by it. And if you now widen the attention to sense into all of us who are here, all of us who are part of this year-long program, and beyond that, all your friends and relations,

just to sense that the same awareness is the essence of who we are, and includes all the changing ways of forms and personalities, honors the sacredness and uniqueness of all, and knows its true home as awake awareness. Loving awareness.