Top 100 Tara Brach Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Mindfulness is a pause – the space between stimulus and response: that’s where choice lies.”

— Tara Brach

2. “Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”

— Tara Brach

3. “Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.”

— Tara Brach

4. “There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”

— Tara Brach

5. “Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.”

— Tara Brach

6. “The most powerful healing arises from the simple intention to love the life within you, unconditionally, with as much tenderness and presence as possible.”

— Tara Brach

7. “By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.”

— Tara Brach

8. “In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.”

— Tara Brach

9. “Imperfection is not our personal problem – it is a natural part of existing.”

— Tara Brach

10. “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

— Tara Brach

11. “What would it be like if I could accept life – accept this moment – exactly as it is?”

— Tara Brach

12. “Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.”

— Tara Brach

13. “On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.”

— Tara Brach

14. “When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.”

— Tara Brach

15. “When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, “Darling, I care about your suffering,” a deep healing begins.”

— Tara Brach

16. “The trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach. The path to “the sweetness of belonging,” is acceptance – acceptance of ourselves and acceptance of others without judgment.”

— Tara Brach

17. “The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.”

— Tara Brach

18. “Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.”

— Tara Brach

19. “Our attitude in the face of life’s challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.”

— Tara Brach

20. “The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.”

— Tara Brach

21. “Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”

— Tara Brach

22. “We wait for things to be different in order to feel okay with life. As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we’ll always be left waiting for it.”

— Tara Brach

23. “When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.”

— Tara Brach

24. “Whatever you encounter, may that be part of the path.”

— Tara Brach

25. “But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”

— Tara Brach

26. “With an undefended heart, we can fall in love with life over and over every day. We can become children of wonder, grateful to be walking on earth, grateful to belong with each other and to all of creation. We can find our true refuge in every moment, in every breath.”

— Tara Brach

27. “The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.”

— Tara Brach

28. “Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.”

— Tara Brach

29. “You have a unique body and mind, with a particular history and conditioning. No one can offer you a formula for navigating all situations and all states of mind. Only by listening inwardly in a fresh and open way will you discern at any given time what most serves your healing and freedom.”

— Tara Brach

30. “Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.”

— Tara Brach

31. “Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.”

— Tara Brach

32. “There are some things we can’t choose, but in being present we can choose how we want to relate to them.”

— Tara Brach

33. “When we’re awake in our bodies and sense, the world comes alive. Wisdom, creativity, and love are discovered as we relax and awaken through our bodies.”

— Tara Brach

34. “There is so much division in this world. So what is really the path of healing? It can begin in this moment, by embracing the life that’s here.”

— Tara Brach

35. “I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what’s going on.”

— Tara Brach

36. “When we open to love, we become love.”

— Tara Brach

37. “We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.”

— Tara Brach

38. “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.”

— Tara Brach

39. “It is through realizing loving presence as our very essence, through being that presence, that we discover true freedom.”

— Tara Brach

40. “Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.”

— Tara Brach

41. “Meditation is evolution’s strategy to bring out our full potential.”

— Tara Brach

42. “Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.”

— Tara Brach

43. “Compassion can be described as letting ourselves be touched by the vulnerability and suffering that is within ourselves and all beings. The full flowering of compassion also includes action: Not only do we attune to the presence of suffering, we respond to it.”

— Tara Brach

44. “Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.”

— Tara Brach

45. “Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.”

— Tara Brach

46. “If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.”

— Tara Brach

47. “We can find true refuge within our own hearts and minds-right here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-momen t lives.”

— Tara Brach

48. “Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, ‘Hey, come back over here, reconnect.’ The only way that you’ll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.”

— Tara Brach

49. “Presence is not some exotic state that we need to search for or manufacture. In the simplest terms, it is the felt sense of wakefulness, openness, and tenderness that arises when we are fully here and now with our experience.”

— Tara Brach

50. “Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.”

— Tara Brach