ACT With Compassion

Each month we highlight some practical resources for therapists interested in compassion. We don’t go into great depth about what we find, but encourage you to check them out if you think they’re interesting.

This Month's Find: Meditations to Open the Heart from Tara Brach

The other day as I was searching for meditation resources, I accidentally emailed Tara Brach. If you are not familiar with her work, Tara Brach is a meditation teacher, psychologist, and author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge. Her work has been highly influential for me as a therapist and human. What I thought I had done was send myself a link to a compassion meditation by Tara Brach. What I had actually done was send Tara Brach a link to her own compassion meditation. (Oops!)

I discovered the error when I received this response from Tara Brach’s assistant, Janet:

Hi Melissa – here’s a better link to use for that meditation:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/tarabrach/2013-10-22-TuePM-Meditation-Compassion-Practice-Tonglen-TaraBrach.mp3

There are several Heart Meditations you could use on your site at:

http://www.tarabrach.com/audioarchives-guided-meditations.html

And many talks on Compassion – freely available through her website or podcast.

I was struck by Janet’s kindness in response to receiving my mysterious email.

Here's how the situation could have gone:

Me: Oh no, I think I just accidentally emailed Tara Brach a link to her own talk. How is that even possible? What a weird thing to do.

Here's how the situation actually went:

I received an email full of heart meditations from Janet at the exact time that I learned that I accidentally sent the email. 

Makes me wonder - What if we could get to the point where making a mistake was an automatic reminder to connect with our hearts? 

Enjoy the Heart Meditation from Tara Brach.