Tara Brach's Resources
Tara
Brach’s teachings blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices,
mindful attention to our inner life, and a full, compassionate engagement with
our world. The result is a distinctive voice in Western Buddhism, one that
offers a wise and caring approach to freeing ourselves and society from
suffering.
As an
undergraduate at Clark University, Tara pursued a double major in psychology
and political science. During this time, while working as a grass roots
organizer for tenants’ rights, she also began attending yoga classes and
exploring Eastern approaches to inner transformation. After college, she lived
for ten years in an ashram—a spiritual community—where she practiced and taught
both yoga and concentrative meditation. When she left the ashram and attended
her first Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat, led by Joseph Goldstein, she
realized she was home. “I had found wisdom teachings and practices that train
the heart and mind in unconditional and loving presence,” she explains. “I knew
that this was a path of true freedom.”
Over the
following years, Tara earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Fielding
Institute, with a dissertation exploring meditation as a therapeutic modality
in treating addiction. She went on to complete a five-year Buddhist teacher
training program at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, under the guidance of
Jack Kornfield. Working as both a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher, she
found herself naturally blending these two powerful traditions—introducing
meditation to her therapy clients and sharing western psychological insights
with meditation students. This synthesis has evolved, in more recent years,
into Tara’s groundbreaking work in training psychotherapists to integrate
mindfulness strategies into their clinical work.
In 1998,
Tara founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC (IMCW), which
is now one of the largest and most dynamic non-residential meditation centers
in the United States. She gives presentations, teaches classes, offers
workshops, and leads silent meditation retreats at IMCW and at conferences and
retreat centers across North America. Her themes reveal the possibility of
emotional healing and spiritual awakening through mindful, loving awareness as
well as the alleviation of suffering in the larger world by practicing
compassion in action. She helped create the Washington Buddhist Peace
Fellowship and has fostered efforts to bring principles and practices of
mindfulness to issues of diversity, peace, and environmental sustainability, as
well as to prisons and schools. Recently, she co-founded the DC-based
Meditation Teacher Training Institute to help address the growing demand for
the teachings of mindfulness and compassion.
In addition
to numerous articles, videos, and hundreds of recorded talks, Tara is the author
of the book Radical Acceptance (2003) andTrue Refuge: Finding Peace &
Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (Bantam, 2013). She has a son, Narayan, and
lives in Great Falls, VA, with her husband, Jonathan Foust; their 2 dogs; and
her mother, Nancy Brach.
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