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If you let someone know you appreciate him or her, especially when you're going to disagree, it gets that person's defenses down.

Tara Brach

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Tara Brach
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 17
Peace Activist
Psychologist
Teacher
Gets
Someone
Persons
Person
Defenses
Going
Disagree
Defense
Appreciate
Especially

More quotes by Tara Brach

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Extend an act of kindness each day. No one has to know. It can be a smile, reassuring words, a small favor - without expecting something in return.
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There's healthy attachment, like with a mother and child. It's biologically part of our survival.
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I knew I could hold myself with that absolute love and compassion.
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Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.
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Offer some gesture of kindness to yourself. Sometimes it's just a message, to say: It's okay. You're going to be okay. We've been through this before. The intention is reassurance, that you are not alone and you can do this. It is the most powerful way to come out of what I call the trance of unworthiness.
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If you can, do a gratitude practice: Each day write down three things you're grateful for. There are different ways to do this. You can have a gratitude buddy, someone with whom, at the end of the day, you exchange messages listing these three things you are grateful for. Also, you can journal it or reflect on it silently.
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I registered the dukkha of self-aversion with such clarity that I knew there was no freedom unless I could love this life without holding back. This didn't mean I was going to ignore my flaws and stop seeking to improve what I could. But in the deepest way, I was not going to fixate on the conclusion that something was wrong with me.
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In intimate relationships, if we start trying to be more real, it's very scary.
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Along with judging myself harshly, I'd also always seen the truth of goodness in me.
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Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.
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When desire for a certain person's attention becomes an I have to have kind of grasping, then identity gets organized around needing that and it becomes very solid and sticky. That causes suffering because we're not inhabiting the fullness of who we are, we're fixated and contracted on life being a certain way.
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Meditation helps us to get out of our thoughts about the future and really be in the present moment.
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Making a U-turn from our thoughts to our feelings re-connects us to our own inner experience and creates the grounds for connecting with others in a more authentic way. It's a movement from head to heart.
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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
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We want to be in open, loving communion with each other and our greatest fear is intimacy. That it won't work and we'll be rejected.
Tara Brach
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Meditation helps us gain the capacity to relax, to connect with what is going on right here and right now, to connect with other people, to re-access our resourcefulness, our clarity and our ability to focus and keep an open heart.
Tara Brach
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We're so used to presenting ourselves and getting approval according to our achievements that it's difficult to be authentic and trust that we'll be accepted just as we are.
Tara Brach
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Unless we're completely awake, have a degree of that. We tense against love and hold on in a way that doesn't let it flow. When that's really strong, the key piece to freeing our hearts is self-compassion.
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There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.
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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