Tara Brach

What is Tara Brach?

Tara Brach (b. 1953) is an American Vipassanā§ teacher and clinical psychologist. She founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and is the public figure most associated with RAIN, a four-step practice for working with difficult emotions.

Lineage and training

Brach trained at the Insight Meditation Society§ in Barre, Massachusetts. That centre was founded by Joseph Goldstein§, Sharon Salzberg§ and Jack Kornfield§ to bring Burmese and Thai forest Vipassanā into the West. Brach also holds a PhD in clinical psychology and ran a psychotherapy practice alongside her dharma teaching for many years. The two streams are visible in her work. The cadence is recognisably IMS. The language for emotional difficulty is therapeutically literate in a way earlier teachers' wasn't.

RAIN

The acronym describes a sequence for meeting difficult feeling. Recognise what is here. Allow it to be as it is. Investigate with kindness. Nurture the part of the self that is hurting. Brach did not invent the steps. Michele McDonald used a similar framework earlier. Brach is responsible for the version that has spread most widely. Its acceptance in clinical settings is partly because each step is both a meditation instruction and a recognisable therapeutic move.

Vs adjacent teachers and practices

Brach is often grouped with the IMS founders, but her register is different. Goldstein§, Salzberg§ and Kornfield§ teach Vipassanā largely as the Burmese and Thai lineages received it. Brach teaches it through a therapeutic lens, with the difficult-emotion vocabulary of clinical psychology layered onto the dharma frame. RAIN is also distinct from MBSR§. MBSR is a secular eight-week curriculum centred on the body scan and standardised for clinical trials. RAIN is a portable four-step protocol that can be applied to a single hard feeling in a few minutes.

In the index

The piece in the index↗ is characteristic. It is a guided meditation embedded in a talk, with the dharma framing kept light enough that the listener can take the practice without taking on the cosmology.