About Us
TARA CENTRE LANCASTER
About Us
The Tara Centre is a registered CIC (Community Interest Company), a grassroots community organisation based in Lancaster and online. We are dedicated to healing, community and social justice for people living with the impacts of trauma, loss, displacement and inequality. Since 2012 we have been creating spaces where people can find friendship, connection and support, particularly during times of difficulty, change, loss or isolation.
Our work is shaped by a simple belief: recovery from trauma cannot happen alone. We need each other to survive and thrive. We also recognise that trauma affects every aspect of our lives and that healing involves more than talking. We offer a range of therapeutic, creative and body-based activities that support people to reconnect with themselves, with others and with life.
Over the years hundreds of volunteers, practitioners, teachers, participants and partners have helped shape the Tara Centre into the community it is today. We invite you to read further about what we believe, how the Centre began, our impact and governance in the following pages and look forward to meeting you.
What we Believe
- We believe in the healing power of love, kindness and community. We believe that we are relational beings who need each other to survive and thrive. We believe that true healing can only happen when we feel witnessed, heard and held in a safe space.
- We believe that we need to go further than the pursuit of individual happiness, and that it is our collective responsibility to develop radical and alternative spaces for health and healing that are trauma-informed, led by people with lived-experience and based on principles of social justice.
- We believe that you are the expert of your own life and your story is yours. You never have to prove yourself or fight to be believed. No one knows what happened to you more than you do.
- We believe many of the conditions you may have been labelled with were ways your nervous system learned to respond to trauma in order for you to survive.
- We believe there are no miracle cures or quick fixes, and we make no such promises. But by creating spaces for love and refuge, we hope we can foster an environment where you can trust again, where you can practice what it feels like to feel safe, and where you can reconnect with yourself and with life in a way that feels good to you.
- Our fundamental belief is that our experiences of individual trauma sit within a social, political and cultural context of ongoing injustice and oppression. Our internalised voices of not feeling good enough, feeling powerless, not feeling seen, feeling deeply alone, or feeling under threat, sit within thousands of years of patriarchal systems designed to make us feel exactly this. These systems of oppression hurt us deeply.
- The pain and suffering of our ancestors is ever present as embodied individual and collective trauma for those of us alive today. We acknowledge that we are born with fears and feelings that don’t belong to us and that we may be unconsciously acting from. Bringing awareness and healing to these is part of our work.
- We follow in the footsteps of those who’ve gone before us, those who understood the importance of energy healing, and the healing necessity of storytelling, movement, music and song, as well as silence, meditation, ritual and the power of community. What we’re offering is perhaps something that was once in place and we’ve lost.
- Without community and connection we cannot heal, survive and thrive. We all need to love and be loved.
- We understand that living with trauma can mean experiencing pain, stress and anxiety, living with chronic health conditions and a sense of exhaustion and fatigue. We design our offerings with this in mind.
