The Three Refuges - Gateways to Belonging and Freedom

Tara Brach

Tara, Dharma, Selfhelp, Talks, Spiritual, Buddhist, Insight, Audio, Tarabrach, Mindfulness, Rain, Psychology, Compassion, Vipassana, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Meditation, Guided, Brach, Buddhism, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 10.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We all need ways to guide our attention that allow us to find wisdom, love and freedom in the midst of our lives. This talk reviews three archetypal gateways—Buddha/awareness, Dharma/truth, and Sangha/loving community. Through teachings, guided meditations and a traditional refuge ritual, we engage together in bringing alive these pathways to healing and peace.

In this video, Tara explores:

Spiritual practice as a journey of remembering our inherent goodness and reconnecting to what truly matters.
The Three Refuges—Buddha (awareness), Dharma (truth), and Sangha (community)—as pathways to peace and belonging.
The difference between false refuges, like seeking approval or blame, and true refuge found in presence and self-compassion.
How the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) transforms challenging emotions into spacious awareness.
The power of widening our circles of belonging through vulnerability, active listening, and embracing shared humanity.

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, and New Year's blessings.
0:33.6	A mom sent me a note a few years back. I'll share it with you.
0:38.3	She was thanking me for teaching the loving-kindness meditation and she wrote, I cherish it so.
0:44.4	When my daughter was very young and she often cried for her father bedtime during a difficult
0:49.6	transition of divorce, I began this practice with her.
0:54.0	I will always remember the first loving
0:56.1	kindness phrase she sent to her dad. May you have cupcakes. So that's become my favorite
1:05.6	meditation, loving kindness phrase, may you have cupcakes.
1:12.3	One of the realizations for many as we enter 2025 is that we need to nourish the pathways
1:20.0	to an inner sense of open-heartedness of peace and balance and well-being.
1:26.1	And this is true just in navigating personal challenges
1:30.3	and more broadly that our world's poly crises are not going to quickly resolve and our earth
1:37.3	will continue to express its dis-ease in ways that have violence and pain and suffering for all of us, all species.
1:48.0	So as the master Ajan Cha put it, if there's a flood, don't let it flood your mind.
1:57.0	And if there's a fire, don't let it burn your heart. As some of you know, I taught an in-person
2:03.7	weekly class for decades in Bethesda, Maryland. And right at the beginning of each year, I would share
2:10.4	a living ritual. And it's based on three archetypal pathways of homecoming, of coming back to a sense of our loving
2:23.0	and open, hard, a sense of our awake and clear mind. And you find these three pathways in many
2:30.0	spiritual traditions. It's described in Buddhism as the three refuges. And I love these three
2:36.1	refuges. The first is moment to moment presence. The second is loving relatedness. And the third is
2:43.6	the spaciousness and wisdom of awake awareness itself. So for today, I chose a favorite talk on these three refuges and I hope that serves
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