Brach Quotes

#1. In the Buddhist tradition, one who has realized the fullness of compassion and lives from compassion is called a bodhisattva.

Tara Brach

#2. 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

#3. Quite simply, if you're feeling anxious, angry, a sense of shame, whatever it is, breathe in and agree to touch or feel it. Breathing out, offer space and care to whatever's there. If there's blocking to touching it, emphasize the in-breath and stay embodied.

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#4. 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.

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#5. Whatever you encounter, may that be part of the path.

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#6. When we open to love, we become love.

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#7. We can't understand the nature of reality until we let go of controlling our experience.

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#8. Nothing is wrong - whatever is happening is just real life.

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#9. 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.

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#10. 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.

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#11. Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.

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#12. 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.

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#13. Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.

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#14. 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.

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#15. I found myself praying: May I love and accept myself just as I am.

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#16. 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.

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#17. Like investigation, healthy doubt arises from the urge to know what is true
it challenges assumptions or the status quo in service of healing and freedom. In contrast, unhealthy doubt arises from fear or aversion, and it questions one's own basic potential or worth, or the value of another.

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#18. 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.

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#19. 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.

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#20. 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.

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#21. Our reality is the thoughts and dramas we see in our mental movies. We

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#22. There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.

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#23. As I noticed feelings and thoughts appear and disappear, it became increasingly clear that they were just coming and going on their own ... There was no sense of a self owning them.

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#24. 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.

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#25. Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.

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#26. Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.

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#27. As we free ourselves from the suffering of 'something is wrong with me, 'we trust and express the fullness of who we are.'

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#28. 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.

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#29. 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.

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#30. Meditation is evolution's strategy to bring out our full potential.

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

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#32. 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?

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#33. The way to develop the habit of savoring is to pause when something is beautiful and good and catches our attention - the sound of rain, the look of the night sky - the glow in a child's eyes, or when we witness some kindness. Pause ... then totally immerse in the experience of savoring it.

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#34. Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.

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

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#36. 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.

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#37. As we figuratively sit beside ourselves and inquire, listen and name our experience, we see Mara clearly and open our heart in tenderness for the suffering before us.

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#38. You can think of spiritual practice as a kind of spiritual re-parenting ... You're offering yourself the two qualities that make up good parenting: understanding - seeing yourself for who you truly are - and relating to what you see with unconditional love.

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#39. The poet Rumi saw clearly the relationship between our wounds and our awakening. He counseled, Don't turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That's where the light enters you.

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#40. Happiness lies not in finding what is missing,
but in finding what is present.

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#41. The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved

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#42. Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.

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#43. 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.

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#44. When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

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#45. The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.

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#46. What would it be like if I could accept life
accept this moment
exactly as it is?

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#47. Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.

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#48. We might begin by scanning our body ... and then asking, "What is happening?" We might also ask, "What wants my attention right now?" or, "What is asking for acceptance?

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#49. 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.

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#50. Imperfection is not our personal problem - it is a natural part of existing.

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#51. It is through realizing loving presence as our very essence, through being that presence, that we discover true freedom.

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#52. 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.

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#53. The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/ himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness.

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

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#55. 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.

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#56. ...other people want to feel important and loved. Just that. [author's patient, Phil]

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#57. 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.

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#58. 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.

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#59. I was manipulating my inner experience rather than being with what was actually happening.

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#60. To failure. Playing it safe requires that we avoid risky situations - which covers pretty much all of life.

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#61. 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.

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#62. 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.

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

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#64. But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.

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#65. 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.

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#66. Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.

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#67. There are some things we can't choose, but in being present we can choose how we want to relate to them

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#68. 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.

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#69. 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.

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#70. 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.

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#71. 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.

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#72. 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.

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#73. Mindfulness is a pause
the space between stimulus and response: that's where choice lies.

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#74. 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.

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#75. Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.

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#76. This is the suffering of fear.
Fear is part of being alive.
Other people experience this too . . . I am not alone. May I be kind to myself . . . may I give myself the compassion I need.

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#77. By running from what we fear, we feed the inner darkness

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#78. The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being without anxiety about imperfection.

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#79. Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.

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#80. In anguish and desperation, I reached out as I had many times before to the presence I call the Beloved. This unconditionally loving and wakeful awareness had always been a refuge for me.

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#81. 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.

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#82. 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.

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#83. Stepping out of the busyness, stopping our endless pursuit of getting somewhere else, is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.

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#84. Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.

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

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#86. In the collective psyche it is being understood ... that we can cultivate wisdom and compassion.

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#87. My prayer became 'May I find peace ... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.

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#88. 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, it's our own true nature.

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#89. Our attitude in the face of life's challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.

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#90. We are waiting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.

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#91. When I was first introduced to Buddhism in a high school World Studies class, I dismissed it out of hand. This was during the hedonistic days of the late '60s, and this spiritual path seemed so grim with its concern about attachment and, apparently, anti-pleasure.

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#92. Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.

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#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.

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