Guided meditation: Happiness and Loving This Life, led by Tara Brach

Today we drew on the work of beloved mindfulness teacher Tara Brach to explore how to find peace, even happiness, in the face of frustration or difficulty. In the prologue to her book True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, Tara wrote about the adversity in her life that drove her own spiritual journey:

My earliest memories of being happy are of playing in the ocean. When our family began going to Cape Cod in the summer, the low piney woods, high dunes, and wide sweep of white sand felt like a true home. We spent hours at the beach, diving into the waves, bodysurfing, practicing somersaults underwater. Summer after summer, our house filled with friends and family—and later, with spouses and new children. It was a shared heaven. The smell of the air, the open sky, the ever-inviting sea made room for everything in my life—including whatever difficulties I was carrying in my heart.

Then came the morning not so long ago when two carloads of friends and family members took off for the beach without me. From the girl who had to be pulled from the water at suppertime, I’d become a woman who was no longer able to walk on sand or swim in the ocean. After two decades of mysteriously declining health, I’d finally gotten a diagnosis: I had a genetic disease with no cure, and the primary treatment was painkillers. As I sat on the deck of our summer house and watched the cars pull out of the driveway, I felt ripped apart by grief and loneliness. In the midst of my tears, I was aware of a single longing. “Please, please, may I find a way to peace, may I love life no matter what.”

True Refuge is a profound and life-changing book Another that you might consider in the same light is Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in integrating mindfulness practices in medicine, trauma, and pain control.