Devotion: Grounds of a Path with Heart, Part 2

Tara Brach

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🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this two-part series, we reflect on the power of devotion as a gateway to awakening that reconnects us with what we love most deeply. Together, we’ll look at how prayer and heartfelt longing can open us to the intrinsic experience of belonging we yearn for. Especially in these times of fear and division, cultivating our natural devotion helps us soften, remember our true nature, and realign with love.

In Part 2, Tara explores:

Devotion as a living expression of our deep longing to belong—to love, to truth, to something larger than the small self.
The power of prayer as a sacred bridge between our vulnerability and the grace of an awakened heart.
The importance of conscious prayer—rooted in presence, sincerity, and a willingness to listen for the wisdom that guides us home.
How the practices of longing, expressing, and receiving open us to grace, healing, and connection with all of life.
How prayer becomes a devotional path—awakening our hearts, deepening compassion, and inspiring courageous action in the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.
0:06.0	To make a donation, please. Thank you for being here.
0:34.4	This is our week two. It's a two-week series on devotion.
0:39.3	And the big picture here is devotion is our felt sense of belonging.
0:45.3	It's the reverence and love for something greater, whether it's the beloved or a sense of the mystery or divine or life itself. And a key expression of devotion is prayer.
0:58.6	It expresses our longing to realize and inhabit that larger belonging. So a personal share,
1:07.2	I grew up, my family belonged to a Unitarian church, and there was not much talk about
1:13.3	devotion or the practice of prayer in my growing up years. When friends shared a story, he said
1:21.1	I was brought up Unitarian. I heard the minister say, God, one time. He had come to our house and he said, oh God, I forgot my
1:30.4	pipe. I loved hearing that. I mean, there's that question, do you use that Unitarian's ever
1:38.3	pray and the answer only when they think their candidate is going to lose an election.
1:45.0	So I'm totally joking because humans from all religions, from all ethnicities, political
1:52.5	affiliations and on, humans around the globe pray.
1:56.9	Huge numbers very consciously and daily and many others in a less formal way.
2:04.3	But even before language, our ancestors lifted their eyes to the stars.
2:11.2	They knelt to the earth. They wept. They sang. They placed their hands on their hearts.
2:17.4	And these gestures of reverence or plea
2:21.3	or gratitude, they're all forms of prayer. From Meister Eckhart, if the only prayer you ever say
2:30.9	in your life was thank you, it would be enough.
2:37.4	So I pray daily.
2:39.4	It's a very conscious practice of prayer really and I feel like it's communicating from
2:45.3	this human heart to spiritual heart space, my larger belonging, the larger truth of really what we are.
	...

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