Tara Brach

Tara Brach is an American clinical psychologist and meditation teacher, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and one of the most widely heard contemporary Buddhist teachers through her long-running podcast and books Radical Acceptance (2003) and True Refuge.

Trained in the vipassana/Insight tradition and in Western psychology, she is best known for popularizing the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) as a method for meeting difficult emotions with mindfulness and self-compassion.

Brach’s significance is as a leading synthesizer of Buddhist mindfulness and Western therapeutic psychology for a mass secular audience. Rather than teaching manifestation, she focuses on acceptance, presence, and healing the “trance of unworthiness”—an emphasis that has shaped the self-compassion movement and the tone of mainstream meditation apps and programs.

She represents the well-supported, psychologically grounded wing of the broader mind-power landscape, where the documented benefits are stress reduction, emotional regulation, and self-relationship rather than external causation.