Top 100 Tara Brach Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When we trust that we are the ocean, we are not afraid of the waves.”

— Tara Brach

52. “I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.”

— Tara Brach

53. “Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.”

— Tara Brach

54. “Nothing is wrong – whatever is happening is just “real life.”

— Tara Brach

55. “By running from what we fear, we feed the inner darkness.”

— Tara Brach

56. “As long as we are alive, we feel fear. It is an intrinsic part of our makeup, as natural as a bitter cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If we resist it or push it aside, we miss a powerful opportunity for awakening.”

— Tara Brach

57. “When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are – not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.”

— Tara Brach

58. “If our hearts are ready for anything, we will spontaneously reach out when others are hurting. Living in an ethical way can attune us to the pain and needs of others, but when our hearts are open and awake, we care instinctively.”

— Tara Brach

59. “Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.”

— Tara Brach

60. “The poet Longfellow writes, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

— Tara Brach

61. “What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience?”

— Tara Brach

62. “The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.”

— Tara Brach

63. “Even a few moments of offering lovingkindness can reconnect you with the purity of your loving heart.”

— Tara Brach

64. “Thoreau writes, “Is there a greater miracle than to see through another’s eyes, even for an instant?”

— Tara Brach

65. “There’s a mystic who says there’s only one really good question, which is, ‘What am I unwilling to feel?”

— Tara Brach

66. “As cartoonist Jules Feiffer puts it: “I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father’s speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father’s walk, my father’s opinions and my mother’s contempt for my father.”

— Tara Brach

67. “Our issues are in our tissues.”

— Tara Brach

68. “True refuge is that which allows us to be at home, at peace, to discover true happiness. The only thing that can give us true refuge is the awareness and love that is intrinsic to who we are. Ultimately, its our own true nature.”

— Tara Brach

69. “When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.”

— Tara Brach

70. “If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.”

— Tara Brach

71. “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

— Tara Brach

72. “I decided to write ‘True Refuge’ during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.”

— Tara Brach

73. “We yearn for an unquestioned experience of belonging, to feel at home with ourselves and others, at ease and fully accepted. But the trance of unworthiness keeps the sweetness of belonging out of reach.”

— Tara Brach

74. “Rather than relaxing and enjoying who we are and what we’re doing, we are comparing ourselves with an ideal and trying to make up for the difference.”

— Tara Brach

75. “Everything within and around us is subject to change; the truth that if we try to hold on to or resist the stream of experience, we deepen the trance of fear.”

— Tara Brach

76. “Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.”

— Tara Brach

77. “When radical acceptance blossoms in our relationships, it becomes a kind of spiritual re-parenting that enables us to trust the goodness and beauty of who we really are. Just as good parenting mirrors back to a child that they are lovable, when we understand and accept others, we affirm their intrinsic worth and belonging. To receive this kind of Radical Acceptance can transform our lives.”

— Tara Brach

78. “This means accepting our human existence and all of life as it is. Imperfection is not our personal problem – it is a natural part of existing.”

— Tara Brach

79. “But Radical Acceptance also means not overlooking another important truth: the endless creativity and possibility that exist in living. By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life will unfold, we open ourselves to hope so that we can move forward with vitality and will.”

— Tara Brach

80. “When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment. Our trance deepens as we move through the day driven by “I have to do more to be okay” or “I am incomplete; I need more to be happy.” These “mantras” reinforce the trance-belief that our life should be different from what it is.”

— Tara Brach

81. “How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

— Tara Brach

82. “We are waiting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.”

— Tara Brach

83. “The “one I love” was everywhere, including within me.”

— Tara Brach

84. “Just as a clear pond reflects the sky, mindfulness allows us to see the truth of our experience.”

— Tara Brach

85. “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and is, therefore, endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. -Sufi poetry.”

— Tara Brach

86. “If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive.”

— Tara Brach

87. “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you.”

— Tara Brach

88. “Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.”

— Tara Brach

89. “Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.”

— Tara Brach

90. “Once someone is an unreal other, we lose sight of how they hurt. Because we don’t experience them as feeling beings, we not only ignore them, we can inflict pain on them without compunction. Not.”

— Tara Brach

91. “The deepest transformations in our lives come down to something very simple: We learn to respond, not react, to what is going on inside us.”

— Tara Brach

92. “The instant we agree to feel fear or vulnerability, greed or agitation, we are holding our life with an unconditionally friendly heart.”

— Tara Brach

93. “We find true refuge whenever we recognize the silent space of awareness behind all our busy doing and striving. We find refuge whenever our hearts open with tenderness and love. We find refuge whenever we connect with the innate clarity and intelligence of our true nature.”

— Tara Brach

94. “Buddhist mindfulness meditation called vipassana, which means “to see clearly.”

— Tara Brach

95. “I became committed to dropping my resistance so I could get to know this energy that was driving the wanting self.”

— Tara Brach

96. “I take refuge in awareness; I take refuge in truth; I take refuge in love.”

— Tara Brach

97. “The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”

— Tara Brach

98. “Mindfulness is the intentional process of paying attention, without judgment, to the unfolding of moment-by-moment experience.”

— Tara Brach

99. “There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”

— Tara Brach

100. “When we disconnect from the body, we are pulling away from the energetic expression of our being that connects us with all of life. By imagining a great tree uprooted from earth, we can sense the unnaturalness, violence, and suffering of this severed belonging. The experience of being uprooted is a kind of dying.”

— Tara Brach