Tara Dakin

The Sacred Mind Psychologist.

Why I Started The Mind Psychologist

I created The Sacred Mind Psychologist because I saw a gap in how people experience themselves, and in the support available to them. Many approaches offer pieces of the puzzle, yet so many people are still struggling to meet life as it unfolds, without the understanding, awareness, and practical tools needed to navigate it with compassion and resilience.

Knowing what helps is only part of the picture. Understanding when and how to apply support is nuanced, relational, and deeply human.

Research increasingly shows that stress and trauma are held not only in the mind, but in the body. The nervous system carries our lived experiences, shaping our emotions, responses, and sense of safety in the world. My work is about helping people understand and work with this, whatever their story, whatever brings them here. We all have a nervous system. We all have emotions, awareness, and an inner world that deserves care and understanding.

Our thoughts, experiences, and nervous system influence how we move through life, yet few people are supported to explore this inner landscape in a meaningful, embodied way. The Sacred Mind Psychologist exists to bridge that gap, offering experiences that weave together psychological insight, somatic awareness, connection, and compassion.

This work supports people to reconnect with themselves, their intuition, their energy, and the quiet wisdom of the body, while also educating, grounding, and returning us to nature’s universal rhythms.

After more than twenty-five years working in psychology and education, I came to understand that true and lasting transformation does not happen through the mind alone. It emerges when we integrate the mind, body, emotions, and the intuitive, soulful self, honouring the whole person.

What Is Wellness?

In my work, wellness is not about fixing yourself or striving to become something better. It is about returning to yourself.

You might come to this work simply wanting to feel more balanced, more like you again. Or you may be facing , or have faced , a great deal. Loss, stress, trauma, change, or long periods of holding things together for others. Wherever you are, wellness meets you there.

Wellness is that inner centre , a steady, gentle space within you that feels familiar, safe, and alive. It is where your nervous system can settle, your body can breathe, and your emotions are allowed to move without being pushed away or overwhelmed.

Sometimes wellness is subtle. It can be the quiet moment where you notice yourself soften, the sense of coming home to your body, or the ability to respond rather than react. Other times it is about rebuilding trust , with yourself, with your sensations, with your inner wisdom.

This work supports you to reconnect with that inner, lovely space — not by forcing change, but by listening, regulating, and allowing your system to find its own rhythm again.

Wellness, here, is wholeness.

The Mind Psychologist Model in a Journal

The model is bound in a book of you. There are questions to answer and things to sketch and annotate all about you. The Strengths of The Mind Psychologist Model lies in its integration. It combines psychological understanding, somatic awareness, energy work, and educational guidance, creating a holistic framework that supports the whole person , mind, body, and soul.

We carry the patterns of our lives in our nervous system, our emotions, and our energy, our Soul. By addressing all of these together, the model allows people to release what no longer serves them, reconnect to their intuition, and align with their true purpose. It is experiential, adaptable, and deeply personal, supporting each person to embody their own wisdom in life. I hope that it serves and helps many.

About Tara Dakin

Since 2012, following a series of significant life events while I was pregnant with my daughter, I began living with anxiety in a way that was not just psychological, but deeply physical and embodied.

My diaphragm, already elevated and restricted through pregnancy, remained held for much of the following decade. Over time this affected my breathing, sleep, and overall sense of safety in my body. I was diagnosed with asthma and relied on inhalers for several years, until eventually they stopped helping. During a period of further anxiety‑provoking life events, it became clear that what I was experiencing was not primarily respiratory disease, but a nervous system held in chronic threat.

With the support and guidance of my GP and Advanced Nurse Practitioner, we made the careful decision to remove the inhalers. I had expressed a strong sense that my breath was being shaped by anxiety and stored energy, and that I needed to relearn how to breathe from within my body rather than manage symptoms from the outside.

I also had to forgive myself, for not listening sooner, for continuing to push through work, single parenting, and responsibility while my body was signalling distress. Deep down, I knew that healing would require me to turn towards my anxiety, not away from it. What followed was not easy.

I spent around eight weeks in what I can only describe as intense nervous system re‑patterning. I tracked and mapped my internal states daily, identified triggers, and consciously coached my body back into safe, functional breathing. Mornings were the hardest. I would wake wheezing, exhausted, jaw clenched from night‑time grinding that fractured wisdom teeth, and profoundly depleted from inadequate oxygenation. I had no clear awareness of what my mind had been processing overnight, but my body clearly had.

Journaling became essential, to offload the day, to bring closure, and to signal safety to a survival nervous system that had remained on high alert for years, always bracing for the next crisis. And of course, life continued to deliver challenges. But my relationship with them began to change.

I learned to work directly with the energy my body was holding: the lower‑back tension, the diaphragm, the jaw, the held breath. Slowly, through patience, daily practice, frustration, wavering faith, and compassion, I released, accepted, and moved forward. This was not a linear process, but it was a truthful one.

This lived experience has profoundly shaped my work as a psychologist. Not only in empathy, but in somatic understanding, in knowing how anxiety, trauma, and adaptation are stored in the nervous system and body over time, and how regulation must be experienced, not simply understood cognitively.

If I could go back in time, I would listen sooner. I would act earlier. And it is precisely because I had to walk this path largely alone that I now offer this work to others—held within both my professional training and the wisdom of lived experience, integrating feminine intuition and masculine structure, safety and strength, science and embodiment.

This is the work I now share.

My name , Tara Dakin, carries a story that has always shaped how I move through the world. Tara is a name that appears across cultures as a figure of guidance, protection, and feminine power:

The Celtic Hill of Tara, seat of ancient sovereignty and druidic ritual; the Buddhist Tara, the swift protector and remover of obstacles; and the Hindu Tara, a tantric guide through transformation and transition. Across these traditions, Tara represents a woman who walks between worlds, holding intuition, leadership, compassion and courage at her centre.

My surname, Dakin, has roots in old English folklore, echoing the “wise-woman” or “hag” figures found in early rural traditions- I’m happy to take the ‘Hag’ for my own humour. While its formal origin relates to “David’s kin,” its linguistic shadow carries the imprint of the hedge‑witch: the healer, the midwife, the spirit‑woman who lived close to the land and held knowledge that was practical, intuitive, and deeply human. Together, my names reflect the path I have always walked, one of navigating thresholds, guiding others, and holding space for transformation in grounded, compassionate, and sometimes unseen ways.