Freeing Ourselves With Mindfulness - with Tara Brach
What you'll learn
- Understand where harmful habits come from and how they become entrenched
- Pause and sense what’s going on when a craving arises, instead of battling it or giving in to it
- Step out of the cycle of hating, blaming and shaming ourselves
- Come back to connectedness
- Sustain positive change
- Really be here for the moments of deep beauty in life that make it all worthwhile
Requirements
- There is no prerequisite to taking this course.
Description
Often when our basic needs and desires are not met, we pursue substitute gratifications. Craving and fixating on these substitute gratifications is what drives addictive and compulsive behaviors.
Overachieving, overextending ourselves, trying to check more and more things off the list: these substitutes are largely socially-accepted. Some private habits, like obsessive thinking or spending many hours every day gaming or browsing online, may go unnoticed.
Other behaviors draw more disapproval (causing us to work harder at keeping them hidden), because everyone can see the damage they do: addictions to alcohol or other substances, gambling, shopping, sex, overeating, violence, and so on.
Whichever attachments we find ourselves caught in, as long as we keep pursuing them and shaming ourselves for doing so, we can’t free ourselves in a deep way.
The good news is that the way we pay attention dramatically affects the structure of our brain and the function of our body, mind and heart. Any time an obsessive thought or a craving arises, if we can learn how to pause just long enough to attend to the feeling of it, we can step out of its trance.
Mindfulness meditation directly de-conditions habitual grasping - the “hungry ghost” syndrome – and allows us to reconnect in a healthy way with the energy of desire that makes all life possible… and joyful!
Who this course is for:
- Anyone with a strong, habitual attachment that causes them pain
- Anyone who struggles with an addiction or habit they just can't break (opioid or other drugs, smoking, sugar, ... etc.)
- Anyone suffering from obsessive thoughts or compulsive behaviors, including eating disorders
- Anyone who feels out of control in some aspect of their life
Course content
- Preview06:54Desire Is Necessary; Clutching Is Painful
- Preview02:16
- 08:34Practice Exercise: Power in Witnessing the Wanting
Instructor
![Tara Brach, Ph.D.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 16,738 Reviews
- 76,923 Students
- 7 Courses
Tara Brach, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, an internationally known teacher of mindfulness meditation, and author of the bestselling Radical Acceptance, True Refuge and Radical Compassion. Her podcast exploring the role of mindfulness in the realization of human potential receives more than two million downloads each month.
Tara’s work is prominently featured in the New York Times guide to meditation and other major media ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post to Tim Ferriss. She has given keynote addresses at conferences offered through Harvard Medical School and Salesforce, among others, and contributed numerous articles to popular magazines and websites.
Tara regularly leads accredited workshops for mental health professionals, as well as retreats for wider audiences, at centers in the United States and Europe. She has been invited to teach classes to United States Congress members and staff, to judges of the D.C. Superior Court, and at the Smithsonian. In addition to her public teaching, she is active in bringing meditation into schools, prisons, and underserved populations around the Washington, D.C. area.
She and Jack Kornfield have co-founded the Awareness Training Institute (ATI) which offers online courses on mindfulness and compassion, as well as the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP).