True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart by Tara Brach Read Free Book Online

with ourselves and others. In more than thirty-five years of teaching meditation, I’ve seen it help countless people to reawaken love, relieve emotional anguish, and let go of addictive behaviors. For so many. the commitment to practicing meditation has created the grounds for a deep and beautiful transformation of heart and spirit.
    Training Your Mind
    When we’re in the thick of lifelong patterns of insecurity or blame, it’s hard to believe that change is possible. Until recently, scientific evidence seemed to confirm this skepticism. Neurologists thought that once we reached adulthood, the basic wiring of our brain was fixed; we were stuck with our core emotional patterning. If we were passive, anxious, and confused during our first decades of life, we were destined to continue that way. Now, with the help of brain imaging and other techniques, researchers have discovered the brain’s inherent neuroplasticity: New neural pathways can be created and strengthened, and the brain and mind can continue to develop and change throughout life. So while we may get caught in very deep emotional ruts, we have the capacity to create fresh ways of responding to life.
    Whatever you think or do regularly becomes a habit, a strongly conditioned pathway in the brain. The more you think about what can go wrong, the more your mind is primed to anticipate trouble. The more you lash out in anger, the more your body and mind are geared toward aggression. The more you think about how you might help others, the more your mind and heart are inclined to be generous. Just as weight lifting builds muscles, the way you direct your attention can strengthen anxiety, hostility, and addiction, or it can lead you to healing and awakening.
    Imagine presence as a spring-fed forest pond—clear, still, and pure. Because we’ve spent so much time lost in the woods of our thoughts and emotions, we often have trouble finding this pond. But as we sit down to meditate again and again, we become familiar with the path through the woods. We can find the gap between the trees, we know the roots we’ve tripped over before, we trust that even if we get caught up in the brush and bramble, we’ll find our way.
    Regular meditation practice creates new pathways in our mind, ones that carry us home to the clarity, openness, and ease of presence. The Buddha taught many strategies for cultivating these pathways, but he considered the practice of mindfulness to be of central importance.
Mindfulness is the intentional process of paying attention, without judgment, to the unfolding of moment-by-moment experience.
If you get lost in worries about paying bills, mindfulness notices the worried thoughts and the accompanying feelings of anxiety. If you get lost in rehearsing what you’ll tell another person, mindfulness notices the inner dialogue and the feelings of excitement or fear. Mindfulness recognizes and allows, without any resistance, all these sensations and feelings as they come and go. The most deeply grooved pathways in our mind are those that lead away from the present moment. By intentionally directing the mind to what is happening right now, mindfulness deconditions these pathways and awakens us to a fresh and intimate sense of being alive. Just as a clear pond reflects the sky, mindfulness allows us to see the truth of our experience.
    The primary style of Buddhist meditation that I teach is called
vipassana,
meaning “to see clearly.” In vipassana, the path to mindfulness begins with concentration—a one-pointed focusing of attention. It’s difficult to be mindful of your experience if your mind is lost in a continuous stream of discursive thought. So first we collect and quiet the mind by directing attention to a sensory anchor. This might mean following the breath, or scanning the body for sensations, or listening to sounds, or silently repeating a phrase such as, “May I be happy,” or “May I be