Tara Brach combines Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to within, and a complete, compassionate engagement with the world. The outcome is a distinctive voice in Western Buddhism, one that gives 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. At that time, she as well started learning about yoga and exploring Eastern approaches to transformation within. 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 says.

“I knew that this was a path of true freedom.”

Then, 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. Working as both a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher, she naturally blended these two powerful traditions—introducing meditation to her therapy clients and sharing western psychological insights with meditation students. This combination 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 in the United States
and Europe. Tara’s podcast gets more than 1.5 million downloads each month. 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 has encouraged attempts to bring principles and practices of mindfulness to issues of racial injustice, equity and inclusivity; peace; environmental sustainability, as well as to prisons and schools.