Ep. 61: “Trust your capacity to change” - Tara Brach Interview

“Trust your capacity to change” - Tara Brach Interview

I am thrilled and honored to share with you an interview I did with my absolute idol, Tara Brach.  If you don’t know who Tara Brach is, let me introduce to you an amazing and inspirational human. Tara Brach is a leading Western teacher of Buddhist Meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening.  Tara is a Clinical Psychologist, meditation teacher and Author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge, two of my favorite books.   In addition, Tara Brach, along side Jack Kornfield, co-founded the Awareness Training Institute (ATI) and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP). For me, Tara’s podcast (tarabrach.com) was (and is) one of the most important parts of my own personal development and growth.  For hours I would (and still do) walk the neighborhood while listening to her podcast.  Tara helped me through some of the hardest times in my life and allowed me to access her tools and wisdom through a freely offered podcast and streaming service that inspired me to create CBTschool.com.  Tara taught me to be a fearless mental health advocate, so you may see that much of CBT School follows her goal of offering skillful and generous work. While I was in Washington, DC for the International OCD Foundation conference, I was lucky enough to meet with Tara in person before her Wednesdays with Tara Meditation Talk and ask her some questions about anxiety and mindfulness.  I am still freaking out with excitement that I had the opportunity to meet her in person and then get to interview her for the Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast. My goal for this podcast episode was to zero in to the questions I often get asked and see what Tara’s response would be.  True to form, Tara gives us some BEAUTIFUL responses that are easy to understand and apply. In this interview, we talk specifically about how uncertainty can be one of the hardest and most challenging parts of anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), panic attacks and depression.  Tara gives some amazing mindfulness tools to help us approach uncertainty. We also talked about her book, Radical Acceptance and what some of the road blocks are to radically accepting our discomforts or fears.  If you haven’t read her books, I strongly encourage you to.  Tara has a way of bringing compassion into the room, even if she isn’t physically there. Tara gives us tips on how to implement Mindfulness practices into our everyday life and normalizes the struggles we all have with this. One of the questions I was most interested in asking Tara was her advice for those who are deeply suffering with mental health right now.  She so beautifully responded with compassion and deep knowledge of mindfulness practice.  This answer brought me to tears and I am so grateful for having this experience with her. And, last of all, I just had to ask Tara about why she uses humor in her meditation talks and Tara kindly shared with us one of her favorite jokes.  Tara used humor a lot to help us understand our own reactivity or idiosyncrasies and I just loved having a little chuckle with her. So, as you can see, I am just a teeny bit in love with Tara (wink, wink).  I really hope you get as much as I did out of this episode.   Thank you so much Tara for your kindness and generosity. Ok folks!  DO NOT FORGET to stay til the end of the episode because Tara so kindly gives an AMAZING GIFT at the end of the interview for our wonderful CBT School community.