In the wake of the 2024 American election, leading Buddhist and mindfulness teacher Tara Brach gathered with friends to sit in silence. They were just outside of Washington, D.C., and fear and reactivity swirled through their minds. But slowly, their thoughts steadied, and they turned to the question: If you were at the end of your life looking back, what would be most important about how you lived today?
In the quiet, the lifeline that came to them was simple: love. As Brach describes it, “Love as the courage to stay open in a world that breaks our hearts. Love as the essence of who we are.”
But how, in these times of so much pain and polarization, can we keep our hearts open to love? Again, an answer rose up for Brach and her friends: courage. “The courage to speak out against injustice,” Brach asserts. “To live our truth. To open to vulnerability even when it hurts. To trust in the goodness woven through all life.”
That day in 2024 planted a seed for her. Brach came away wanting to help people overcome the despair, anger, and hopelessness they were experiencing, allowing them to show up in the world with integrity and purpose. To give us the tools we need in these difficult times, Brach created the new workbook The Courageous Heart.
For guidance, she turned to the Buddhist path of the bodhisattva, an awakened being—one who is wholly committed to the benefit of others. According to Brach, a bodhisattva is not only an archetype or legendary figure embodying compassion; there are also ordinary bodhisattvas who express care for their children, colleagues, neighbors, and to those beyond their immediate circles. What does it mean to live as a bodhisattva? “We engage from an awake heart, a wise heart,” says Brach.
The acts of ordinary bodhisattvas are the sustaining light of our world, she explains, and in this time of bigotry, failing democracies, climate disruption, war, and humanitarian crises, we need their light now more than ever. Brach presents the bodhisattva practices that she thinks are most transformational in this moment with the hope that, through them, we will discover our belonging to the web of life—our belonging to something larger than the small self—and that, inspired by this belonging, we will do the work we’re called to do together.
Brach feels “there is a growing movement of people who care deeply and who want to respond with presence, courage, and compassion. It’s a spiritually based, engaged movement that has emerged around the globe and is coalescing now. The workbook is for anyone who feels that call to serve this world and to do it from heart and from spirit.”
Organized into six parts, the workbook begins with practices that are centered on the ground of our inner work and then widens the circle of compassion to include others, even our so-called enemies. It offers practices for engaging in conversations across political divides, with practical advice for approaching the conversations and backing away when we are feeling unbalanced. In the last section we are reminded to nourish ourselves through prayer, remembering our bodhisattva aspiration, calling on our ancestors, and maintaining a grateful heart.
The book ends with a blessing for us all: “May we trust the light of our hearts. May we remember that we are never alone.”
To understand the vision behind The Courageous Heart, it helps to look at the path that shaped Tara Brach—a clinical psychologist, founder of the Insight Community of Washington, D.C., and the author of best-selling books on mindfulness, Buddhism, and psychology, including Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha and True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart.
Brach began her life of searching and service in East Orange, New Jersey, just outside of Newark. The oldest of four, she grew up with a kind of nature spirituality, spending time outdoors with her family birdwatching and hiking. It was in nature that she had her earliest transcendent experiences.
At the time, 1960s East Orange had a Black-majority population. In elementary school she was one of five white kids in the whole school, which she says “was a little unusual.”
Her mother was a recovering alcoholic who took up supporting others with addictions as her profession. And her father was a Civil Rights attorney, which meant that her family was steeped in progressive racial and social justice politics.
As a result of her upbringing, Brach entered adulthood believing that she was nonracist. Of course, this means that there were missed opportunities for self-interrogation and reflection, and as she acknowledges, “In a way I was more blind because I had a lot more unveiling to do.”
In college Brach took up yoga, a practice which opened her to a sense of union and communion and was a gateway to her realizing that reality was much more than she had thought. It also lit up her longing to explore the world of experience in consciousness.
After college, she lived at an ashram for twelve years and taught yoga. There, she began reading Buddhist books and attended her first Buddhist retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She shifted from teaching yoga to teaching Buddhist meditation while getting her PhD in psychology. It was then that she began weaving what she was learning in Western psychology with Eastern philosophy, teachings, and practices.
Today, Brach is a cofounder of Banyan, a community meditation space, and, with Jack Kornfield she’s coleader of the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program. She publishes a weekly newsletter and hosts a podcast with more than two million monthly downloads. Her meditation instructions are offered freely on her website and across multiple meditation apps.
“We are living in a dark time, a precarious time,” Brach says, “and in order to respond wisely, we need the inner practices that keep us connected to our full intelligence and our heart.”
As Tara Brach teaches, mindful presence is the foundational practice of the bodhisattva. Without first fully inhabiting our own bodies, we cannot embody love and clarity.
In the face of upheaval, our instinct is often to react with fight or flight. To help with this, one of the mindfulness practices Brach offers is called “the inner pause.” To practice it, whenever we realize we’re caught in reactivity, we simply stop whatever we’re doing and take three to five long, deep breaths—releasing worries and tightness in the body with each inhalation. Notice, in this moment, what is unfolding in the body.
The inner pause is not passive navel-gazing. It is, rather, a courageous act of remembering to ground ourselves in wisdom and compassion before speaking or acting. “In the stillness of the pause, we step out of reactivity and reconnect with the deeper truth of our being,” writes Brach. “From here, we can meet the world not with fear or vengefulness but with a heart that is steady, tender, and awake.”
In this steadiness, we can begin to embrace our own intrinsic goodness, our own full humanity. This self-love is key for bringing love to bear in the world. Instead of rejecting or avoiding the vulnerable parts of ourselves, we learn to meet them with compassion.
Brach is well-known for teaching RAIN, a powerful practice that cultivates self-compassion. RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. Based on mindfulness, it’s an effective way to work with difficult emotions we’re experiencing. Brach has heard from many people that the practice changed or even saved their lives.
In RAIN practice, we first Recognize what is happening inside of us in the moment, while being kind and receptive to our bodies and hearts. We Allow our feelings to arise, including resistance, and understand that they all belong. The next step is to Investigate our painful feelings with kind attention so that we can deepen our understanding of them. Finally, we Nurture ourselves by offering care and compassion to our inner lives. This might include putting a hand on our hearts and sensing into our compassionate touch.
Brach first encountered RAIN practice many years ago through Insight Meditation teacher Michelle McDonald. As Brach explains it, she revised the practice to include the step of compassion and began teaching “where it lands on nurturing.” While it’s not a new technique, it weaves mindfulness and compassion together in a way that’s easy to remember, which is what people need when they’re in distress: a simple, reliable way to summon care for themselves and others.
RAIN practice is followed by a phase that Brach calls “after the RAIN,” a period in which there is no doing at all, but rather simply resting in a larger sense of who we are. Brach says we “relax and let go into the heartspace that has emerged.” Through it, we loosen up the old sense of self and identity. The practice works for a wide range of difficult or reactive emotions, she explains, because “there is less identification with the emotion and more resting in the space of wholeness and intelligence and a heart that can hold it.”
In addition to its benefits for individuals, RAIN can be especially helpful in collective spaces where there is a lack of safety or understanding. Taking a moment to pause with the practice allows people to meet what’s arising, wake up to their personal identifications, and open to their capacity to face and process what needs attention. As has always been true, but especially in these perilous times, we need tools to come home to our inner lives and our larger society from a more awake heart. RAIN practice helps us with that.
Now, we turn our attention to how to love without holding back in relationships. While love and compassion are innate in us, they’re also qualities we can cultivate. And our personal relationships are the training ground in our journey of love. Day to day, we can learn how to listen and speak with empathy, even in moments of conflict.
An interpersonal practice Brach teaches is called “remembering the gold.” As she writes, “We come to know who we are through the reflections of others. But often, those reflections are distorted by cultural conditioning and personal wounds. Over time, this can obscure the truth and goodness of who we really are.” A precious gift we can give to others is mirroring their inner beauty, so that they can know it.
To practice remembering the gold, take a moment to settle into mindfulness. Then think of someone you care about and try to see this person anew while simultaneously bearing in mind what you know of their past. Can you connect with their goodness? Contemplate what the person cares about deeply and what gives their life meaning. Reflect on their positive qualities and moments in which you’ve seen them at ease and happy. Finally, imagine telling this person how you see them. What words would you use to express this lovingly and sincerely?
To further love without holding back in relationships, we can also practice forgiveness, even when the one who has harmed us is no longer in our lives. “Forgiveness is ultimately an inner movement,” says Brach, “an opening of the heart, a letting go of what has us so bound. So, even if someone is not able to meet us, we can still engage in the practice in a way that’s deeply transformational. It doesn’t require reconciliation or contact. It’s about freeing our own heart and that grip of resentment, shame, and unresolved pain.”
Brach encourages us to widen the circle of our compassion. For most of us, it’s relatively easy to be empathetic toward those we see as part of our in-group, those we perceive as being “like us.” But in these times of hatred, division, and escalating violence, it’s of critical importance that we bridge the divides of race, politics, nationality, etc. So, who do we ignore or judge or avoid? The practice calls for us to see their humanity, to know that like us, they long for happiness and freedom from suffering.
As Brach explains, the unconscious biases we carry are not our fault. “Human societies are steeped in hierarchy,” she writes, “and in our contemporary world, these hierarchies often center around race, gender, religion, disability, political affiliation, and socioeconomic class. We are shaped by our social identities and by cultural conditioning that instills implicit bias—automatic judgments we may not even be aware of.”
Yet we are not powerless against unconscious bias. We can do the work of looking honestly at our prejudices and freeing ourselves from them. Reflecting compassionately, without guilt or shame, is a cornerstone of this transformation. To do this practice, Brach guides us in bringing to mind the following groups of people in turn: people of a different race, people of a different ethnic group, nationality, or religion, people living with a disability, people with a different sexual orientation or different political views, and people from a different social class.
If possible, you can think of a few individuals you know from each group. Group by group, gently and honestly notice any subtle judgment, aversion, or blame that arise. How do you feel they compare to you in terms of intelligence, ethicality, capability, attractiveness, or spiritual potential?
“Let this be a moment of courageous truth-telling,” writes Brach. “You are not alone. We all carry these inherited lenses. The gift of awareness is that it opens the door to healing.”
The call to taking compassionate action in our troubled world naturally arises when we feel our belonging. But it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the mountain of suffering all around us—environmental destruction, refugee displacement, gun violence, crumbling democracies, animal cruelty, and more. You can’t respond to everything, so how do you know where to begin? One approach that Brach offers is to explore what breaks your heart. This, she teaches, is your north star.
To do this practice, begin by closing your eyes. Inhale and exhale deeply a few times, and then place your hand on your heart. Allow the suffering of the world to enter your mind, letting images arise such as of a war-torn city, a burning forest, and a family torn apart by injustice. Notice what moves you most deeply, and let yourself feel the ache of it. Kindly inquire what love is asking of you.
“You don’t need to know the whole path,” says Brach. “Just the next small step.” With all of us taking small steps, we can change the world.
Finally, Brach brings us to nourishing the soul, or—as she describes it—“the innermost essence of presence, aliveness, and love.” Here, we’re called to slow down, tend the sacredness in us and all around us, and replenish our ability to be there for others.
Gratitude is one of practices Brach teaches for nourishing the soul. Sit quietly, she instructs, and allow your body to be at ease. Taking a few moments, think about what you appreciate, letting your mind wander through the people, places, and experiences that bring you joy. Now, choose one image, thought, or memory that touches your heart. This can be as simple as a loved one’s smile or your morning tea. Bask in the fullness of your appreciation and notice where you feel this gratitude in your body and what it feels like.
Gently let go of the particular image you have in mind and drop into the pure, warm feeling of appreciation. “Breathe and savor,” writes Brach.
Joy undercuts authoritarianism, she tells me. When we respond to terrorization and fearmongering with solidarity and a celebration of togetherness, when we take time to savor the beauty and goodness of life, we are empowered and moved in the direction of more internal as well as external freedom.
I first became familiar with the work that Tara Brach was doing around equity and racial justice when I learned the story of Travis Spencer, an African American person. He visited Brach’s popular Wednesday night class at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW). People filled every seat in the room—except for the one next to him. This made him question his right to be there, and those of us in bodies of color will know immediately how he felt. Many of us do not return to these spaces.
The experience tainted Spencer’s ability to receive the Buddha’s teachings that evening. As he put it, he “sat through the meditation in inner turmoil” and fled as soon as it was over. But rather than try to ignore or suppress his experience, as many of us do, Spencer wrote a blog post titled “The Color of the Buddha Heart” and shared it with Brach.
Instead of dismissing Spencer’s experience or advising him to “simply concentrate on his breathing,” Brach responded to his generous outreach with reciprocity. As a result, Spencer has established a long, committed relationship with IMCW’s POC sangha and with Brach personally.
Making the decision to be with what she calls the “healthy discomfort” of recognizing her internalized racism, she has spent a number of years engaging in both inner and outer work to examine her assumptions and admits that “it is a steep learning curve because there is such a thick culture of conditioning that we don’t even notice how much we’re in it.”
In a later article that centered Spencer’s experience, Brach acknowledged that IMCW is “an overwhelmingly white organization and often unaware of the white privilege and racism that it carries as part of its collective conditioning as a dominant culture group.” This speaks to the fact that white supremacy is the water in which we all swim. It takes vigilance to question and resist its pull.
The practices Brach teaches invite us to open our hearts in profound ways. They also call us to action. We can be open to collective suffering and courageous in our response to injustice. This current moment gives us ample opportunity to practice this in very real ways—neighborhood initiatives, joining protests, offering care to those in our community who are being affected by current policies—while also tending to our own suffering. It is critical we remember that we too are part of the circle of care.
Although she’s experiencing the anger and grief that goes with being awake to the suffering in the world, Brach is experiencing hope. As she says, “In moments of darkness, movements cohere to bring in more light.”
As we neared the end of our conversation, I commented on the number of diverse projects and initiatives that Brach is engaged in. Rather than offering a pithy life hack or some similar strategy, she stated simply that meditation helps her come home to herself. She said, “It is the undercurrent in navigating everything in my life—underneath it all there is a presence that connects us, a natural intelligence that is innately caring.”
The post Tara Brach’s Love & Courage appeared first on Lion’s Roar.
Recent Comments