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In intimate relationships, if we start trying to be more real, it's very scary.

Tara Brach

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Tara Brach
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 17
Peace Activist
Psychologist
Teacher
Intimate
Scary
Relationships
Start
Real
Trying

More quotes by Tara Brach

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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.
Tara Brach
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If [kids] get into loving relationships, they're afraid they'll be found wanting, won't have the looks or body shape our culture deems worthy. Many of us feel we're falling short and if we start feeling close to another person, that we'll be found out and rejected.
Tara Brach
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Underneath the stress is fear, and the biggest is our own personal fear of failure.
Tara Brach
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With mindfulness training we are able to recognize when we get lost in our mental dramas, and bring a kind and nonreactive presence to the feelings that accompany them.
Tara Brach
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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
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Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
Tara Brach
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Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.
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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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.
Tara Brach
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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.
Tara Brach
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If there's a demand of being together in a certain way, those expectations and judgements take away from that space and create an edginess and a cramped-ness to the relationship.
Tara Brach
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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.
Tara Brach
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I speak a lot about what I call the trance of unworthiness which is really epidemic in our culture, this sense of I'm not enough, or something's wrong with me. Most of us have some level of it because our culture has all these standards (handed down through our families) of what it means to be okay.
Tara Brach
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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.
Tara Brach
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Allowing another to be as they are is more what I think of as space. The space to express yourself and know that you're going to be accepted. That's more where I go than with the actual physical logistics of how much time you have together and how much time you have apart.
Tara Brach
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Telling each other the truth and being who we are, and having space for the other person's vulnerability in being who they are, allows us to move in a kind of dance together that's very fluid and graceful.
Tara Brach
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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.
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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Even a few moments of offering lovingkindness can reconnect you with the purity of your loving heart.
Tara Brach
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My first book, 'Radical Acceptance', grew out of the suffering of feeling personally deficient and unworthy. Because most of us are so quick to turn against ourselves, the teachings and practices of radical acceptance continue as a strong current in 'True Refuge': nurturing a forgiving, understanding heart is a basic step on the path.
Tara Brach