Dr. Tara

Bio

Dr. Tara, PhD, is a spiritually-inclined clinical psychologist, speaker, author, retreat leader, and former faculty member of Cornell University’s Medical College. Her focus is on developing methods for transcending the ego towards the end of living a heart-centered life.  Dr. Tara’s book on this topic, which seamlessly integrates psychological and spiritual concepts to provide a concrete path to living beyond ego, will be published in 2024. In line with this work, she also gained a personal interest in the impacts of spiritual abuse and put together a “multimedia guide to recovery” - which is essentially a great list of resources created by other amazing folks - that is listed here on this site.

Prior Work

While in her academic role on faculty at Cornell, Dr. Tara created Integrative Modalities Therapy (IMT), a flexible and easy-to-implement treatment for eating disorders, which are notoriously difficult to treat and deadly. IMT was published by New Harbinger at the end of 2019, just prior to eating disorder rates nearly tripling during the pandemic. The Spanish translation is now available. Dr. Tara’s treatment is now used all over the world to treat people with eating disorders. Being a leading expert on eating disorders - which are ego based - serves as the perfect background for developing a method to transcend the ego more broadly.

Prior her work in eating disorders, Dr. Tara served as the senior laboratory manager at the Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Research at Harvard University, where she helped conduct studies on borderline personality disorder, suicide, self-injurious behaviors. She has also held leadership positions in the Academy for Eating Disorders as well as the New York City CBT Association, and served on the editorial board of Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention. Her work has been widely cited in the academic literature and has been discussed in major media outlets such as the Harvard Gazette, Science Daily, and TIME.