This page lists some of the all-time best Tara Brach quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Trance & Suffering Quotes
- Thinking & Feeling Quotes
- Awareness & Acceptance Quotes
- Witness & Waking Up Quotes
- Spiritual Practices Quotes
50+ Tara Brach Quotes on Trance, Awakening, Practices, & More
Tara Brach Quotes on Trance & Suffering
“The key delusions in all humans: this dream or trance that we’re a separate self, that something’s missing, that we’re not whole—and that the spiritual freedom we long for is down the road or in the future out there.” — Tara Brach
“We were all subjected to conditioning that created, to different degrees, self and trance—that made us feel like we were disconnected, we’re separate, apart from the rest of the living world, and to different degrees not okay.” — Tara Brach
“The trance of unworthiness: how much our being is trapped in a sense of falling short … When you get caught in that trance of unworthiness, when you feel the suffering, pause.” — Tara Brach
“The undercurrent of this trance is feeling that something’s missing in our lives, that something’s wrong with how we’re living.” — Tara Brach
“We intuit at moments a larger sense of being beyond that trance of a small self … Mindfulness and compassion widen the sense of being and allow you to enlarge beyond the trance of a separate self.” — Tara Brach
“We are very hooked on ‘it should be different than how it is’. And when we have that going that life in this moment should be different … it’s an evaluation of badness. It’s an aversion towards what’s right here, towards reality.” — Tara Brach
“My deepest suffering, the core of it, was a sense of not enough—and when it was really bad, real self-aversion.” — Tara Brach
“The Buddha said that the great suffering we experience is not realizing the truth of who we are, our true nature, and being caught up in an identification with a small, limited self.” — Tara Brach
“Suffering is really awareness’ way of letting us know there is a blockage. That invitation to let go is an expression of love because letting go is freeing.” — Tara Brach
“Suffering, this feeling of ‘this doesn’t feel good’, is often what nudges us to let go. It’s like we realize it’s more painful to hold on than to go through the process of letting go.” — Tara Brach
“When we are living out stimulus-react looping, we are believing something that’s not true. We are living in a very confined reality of a separate and limited self, a reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are.” — Tara Brach
“As long as we’re identified as an egoic self, as a separate self, there’s always going to be a feeling of deficiency … If we’re identified as a separate self, we’re identified with a fragment of what we are. And, there’s some wisdom in us that actually recognizes that this isn’t the truth of who I am.” — Tara Brach
“Every one of us, if we are in any way suffering, we are suffering because there is some patterning that has locked in—that’s rooted in fear—and that we keep playing out over and over again, and it’s confining our sense of being.” — Tara Brach
“Suffering is when we’re exclusively identified with the waves and forget the ocean.” — Tara Brach
“In our contemporary culture, especially in the West, there are very few natural ways of belonging that help to reassure us of what you might call our ‘basic goodness’, our feeling connected and a part of something larger. And, that exacerbates the sense of I’m afraid, I’m wrong, I’m bad, I’m not okay, I’m deficient.” — Tara Brach
”It’s powerful how we get conditioned to believe we’re this particular separate human with certain limiting characteristics and then live our decades according to that internalized self-view.” — Tara Brach
“Our ego’s mission is to control our experience.” — Tara Brach
“‘Selfing’ is living in the stories and feelings of a separate self. Everything is perceived with this lens of this is happening to me, it’s owned by me, I am at the center of things, I am the doer, I am the controller.” — Tara Brach
“We live in this life in these big swaths of virtual reality and stories—a lot about a self who’s separate, who’s often deficient, who’s threatened, who’s really not enough.” — Tara Brach
“We’re not invited towards contentment … We’re not invited to relax and say this moment’s enough. That would stop the economy in its tracks.” — Tara Brach
“Habits end up creating our sense of identity and, if they are really hardened, become our destiny … When they create our destiny and when they are based in fear, they become the block in our lives to accessing all that we can be, to accessing happiness and creativity and, in a deep way, a sense of our spirit.” — Tara Brach
Tara Brach Quotes on Thinking & Feeling
“To the degree that we suffer, we are believing thoughts that are not true, and we are caught in some kind of reactive looping that is keeping us identified with something that is smaller than the truth of who we are.” — Tara Brach
“Recognize thinking, and when you’re caught in a thought, let go and open back into full presence … To catch the thought-patterns is often a powerful way to start de-conditioning the looping.” — Tara Brach
“When we are insecure and we have insecure thoughts and we act out of them, we create responses that then deepen our sense of insecurity.” — Tara Brach
“We try to judge ourselves into being a better person. We try to fix ourselves through judgment.” — Tara Brach
“No amount of accomplishing, no amount of judging, actually helps us to contact experience and trust our goodness.” — Tara Brach
“We think we have our own views, but we’re not thinking our own thoughts. We’re thinking society’s thoughts.” — Tara Brach
“What are the limiting beliefs about yourself?” — Tara Brach
“Are these thoughts serving healing, connecting with others, and freedom—or are they serving that sense of a separate self, a deficient self, a beleaguered self?” — Tara Brach
“When we are believing our thoughts, (it) keeps us in reactivity.” — Tara Brach
“Please, don’t believe your thoughts. Please, just pause and come back into presence. Please, remember love.” — Tara Brach
“Don’t believe the thoughts, come into a wise relationship with yourself, and then trust the loving—trust who we are.” — Tara Brach
“I am not my thoughts. I don’t have to believe them. There is profound freedom that comes with that.” — Tara Brach
“Rather than living inside thoughts, you are aware that they are happening. The point isn’t to get rid of thoughts; just know that they are there so that you don’t mistake them for reality.” — Tara Brach
“There is no way your idea is the same thing as the living reality. Thoughts are never reality.” — Tara Brach
“Thinking can us towards what’s beyond words.” — Tara Brach
“Thoughts are real, but they are not truth.” — Tara Brach
“Jill Bolte Taylor described how emotions last for about 1.5 minutes. But if thoughts are there, if you’re lost in thoughts, then the emotions become a mood.” — Tara Brach
Tara Brach Quotes on Awareness & Acceptance
“It’s easy to think of our lives and the spiritual path as going somewhere, trying to get somewhere different, but the path is really learning to let go of whatever is keeping us from the presence that’s right here now.” — Tara Brach
“Feel that loving awareness in you, and just get to know that as really the place you can trust.” — Tara Brach
“This is the real power and freedom of mindfulness: that we develop this capacity to recognize what’s happening and allow it, let it be.” — Tara Brach
“As Carl Rogers put it, ‘It wasn’t until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change.’ In other words, the prerequisite for true transformation and healing is this radical acceptance, this presence and kindness, with what’s right here.” — Tara Brach
“If we want to try to trust or accept our ego self, it’s not going to work because the ego self is unreliable, out of control, will cause trouble, is striving, is afraid. So, building a true sense of trust comes from contacting the deeper parts of our being.” — Tara Brach
“Very often the pathway to acceptance comes with being able to start pausing when we feel we’re caught in ‘something’s wrong with me, I’m unworthy.’” — Tara Brach
“What we’re accepting is the life that’s right here … We’re embracing the lived experience. What happens as we do that is the sense of separate self actually dissolves. The freedom that we experience on the other end of truly accepting the life that’s here is we discover that we’re way beyond any story we had of ourselves.” — Tara Brach
“The path to realizing who we are and living from that freedom … is learning to bring radical acceptance and unconditional compassionate presence to the experience of the moment.” — Tara Brach
“No matter how right we think we are that something should be different, it’s an argument with the reality of the moment.” — Tara Brach
“Letting go—letting go of control, letting life be as it is—means opening to change, opening ultimately to our impermanence.” — Tara Brach
“What is between me and presence? What is between me and open-heartedness right in this moment?” — Tara Brach
“Our full and openhearted presence here now is the top of the mountain. It is what we’re seeking. That’s where the Buddha resides, right here and now, only in these precious moments.” — Tara Brach
“The essence of all sickness is homesickness. There’s a suffering when we leave home. We forget what we really belong to—that aliveness and awareness and loving—we forget who we are.” — Tara Brach
“Coming back home—letting go—isn’t actually a doing … We don’t do letting go. It’s actually an undoing: a ceasing or a letting go of the contracting, a releasing of the way we’re tensing, a releasing of the ways we’re closed off.” — Tara Brach
“May we each discover this pathway of homecoming in a way that really allows us to trust our natural being. And may we live our days from this presence, from this loving.” — Tara Brach
“The key is that we always start right where we are.” — Tara Brach
“Awareness is a given, we’re just not aware of being aware.” — Tara Brach
“Your true nature is always already here.” — Tara Brach
“Even in the moments when our neurosis is full bloom—when we’re completely activated and sensing that we’re deficient, we’re failing, we’re messing up—we’re not separated from the loving awareness that’s our true nature.” — Tara Brach
“Rather than being attached to the wave—trying to control the wave or being possessed by the wave—in a moment of mindfulness, we become the ocean relating to the wave.” — Tara Brach
Tara Brach Quotes on the Witness & Waking Up
“A very key inquiry on the spiritual path in most spiritual traditions is that question, ‘Who am I really?’” — Tara Brach
“The spiritual path is all forgetting and remembering.” — Tara Brach
“What we seek is right here. It’s what we are.” — Tara Brach
“How do we begin to stop the war against ourselves? The wake up is usually some form of suffering.” — Tara Brach
“It’s part of our evolution to be able to see that conditioning and awaken beyond that exclusive identity with a separate self.” — Tara Brach
“We are waking up together, and we invite each other into it … We are really not in it alone.” — Tara Brach
“How do we wake up from that limiting identity of being separate or being deficient, and live from our true nature?” — Tara Brach
“The ‘backward step’ is shifting from focusing on the object—which includes focusing on our self-object—to sensing the awareness itself.” — Tara Brach
“The shift is that we actually move from the unworthy self to that kind of compassionate presence that is witnessing and with the unworthy self. That shift is the movement towards freedom.” — Tara Brach
“From that witnessing place, this is trance and this is a portal for awakening.” — Tara Brach
“No matter what your level of experience, you can trust that you’ll take what most serves your awakening awareness.” — Tara Brach
“Register from that witnessing place, ‘Okay, so this is a taste of who I am beyond trance.’” — Tara Brach
“I more quickly recognize, ‘Oh okay, I’m caught in the beliefs and feelings that have to do with unworthy self.’ There’s less lag time, and I don’t believe it as much. It’s like the feelings and the thoughts are there, but the sense of who I am beyond the self that I’m judging are much more alive and accessible. There is a beingness here—a loving heart, an awareness—that isn’t so identified with the unworthy self.” — Tara Brach
“Relax and open into a friendly presence—a kind of witnessing—that’s kind, more space, more ease.” — Tara Brach
“I’m aware of this sensation … Find the ‘I’ who’s aware of the sensation, that ‘I’ that’s witnessing the sensation.” — Tara Brach
“Find the witness that’s aware of the self—that which is noticing whatever is being noticed about the self.” — Tara Brach
“Sometimes I’ll imagine that I have no head—because that’s a common place to locate the self—and it’s just space that’s experiencing what’s happening.” — Tara Brach
“Notice this tender presence that’s more the truth of who you are than any limiting story or belief. The more you trust this, the more freedom, creativity, love, aliveness you’ll find in your life.” — Tara Brach
“Deep, deep down the ‘who we are’ is loving-presence.” — Tara Brach
“We get identified with the covering, we think we’re the covering—that controlling, promoting self—and we forget who’s looking through. We forget the tender awake heart, the awareness that’s looking through.” — Tara Brach
“When the sense/idea of the self softens—when it’s no longer our exclusive identity, when it’s no longer occupying the center of experience—what remains is this vastness, this mysterious openness and wakefulness and love that’s really the essence of all.” — Tara Brach
“Never underestimate the power of your caring. With one small gesture you can change a person’s life.” — Tara Brach
“When in some way there is a remembrance of love, the ‘what we are’ opens and we become a bigger space of presence.” — Tara Brach
“We’re all doing this project of embracing the life that’s right here—its pleasantness, its unpleasantness—and the discovering that we’re beyond any story we might have ever told about ourselves.” — Tara Brach
“In any moment that we truly aren’t resisting—that we’re truly opening to the life of the moment—we have the capacity to love more fully and to realize that this mystery, this vastness, that’s really what we are.” — Tara Brach
Tara Brach Quotes on Spiritual Practices
“The gift of meditation, of training in presence, is that it really allows our body and mind to be in the same place at the same time.” — Tara Brach
RAIN Technique:
“When we get caught in the trance of unworthiness, we can say, ‘Okay, just pause’ … RAIN is a process of detangling the trance, and it really comes down to a mindful awareness with kindness … What RAIN does when we offer ourselves attention, and when we bring in that nurturing, is a kind of spiritual re-parenting. We’re bringing the presence and kindness we need to heal.” — Tara Brach
- Recognize: Recognize what’s going on. See what’s here. All the thoughts and feelings of unworthiness right here. Name it.
- Allow: Allow it to be here, not to fight it, not to judge it, just let be. Just allow it all to be there. Don’t try to get away from what’s going on. Deepen the pause.
- Investigate: Investigating is connecting with what’s going on in the body but with kindness. Deepen the inquiry into the body, and feel what’s there. Contact it. Begin to investigate a bit. Investigate with an intimate attention or investigate with kindness because we just bring a gentle yet interested attention to what’s going on. This is where we start loosening the grip to free us from the trance. You have to get under the thoughts, under the storyline.
- Nurture (or Not Identified): It sounds like a dry term, but it’s actually liberation. When I’m not identified with that unworthy self, I’m free to inhabit my wholeness. I’m free to inhabit the loving awareness that’s really here but been clouded over. Bring kindness to what we find. When we do that, we experience what’s called ‘after the RAIN’ which means we start opening to our natural being.
3 Steps of Letting Go:
- Let go of the thoughts: Once we’ve recognized that ‘oh, there is something between me and presence’, we stop the activity of squeezing. Let go of the squeezing activity.
- Open into the body: Open into what’s actually right here underneath, the felt sense in the body. Say ‘yes’ to what’s actually here, the reality underneath the grasping, the avoiding. Let the feelings that are there be.
- Hold with kindness: Remember love, hold it with compassion. Contact the love that allows for a full letting go.
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