My story

I am a lover of body movement! I express myself through sports and in this lifetime I had incredible success as a competitive athlete. It was a true expression of what was inside of me because when I ran, I felt more animal than human, thrilled with the power of my muscles and the connection I had to nature by being outside.

We moved to the mountains when I was 11 and I became an alpine ski racer, but with two high speed crashes and the intimidation of moving downhill so fast, I chose to use my gift of a really amazing set of lungs to become a cross country ski racer. My sister, Keli, and I were named to the US Ski Team just three years after our ski career began. I was also recruited by Middlebury College which at the time had the best ski team in the country. “On paper,” there was extraordinary opportunity in the outer world!

The inner world, my emotional world, wasn’t as healthy as the way I expressed my self through sports. Like Pavlov’s dog, I developed a conditioned response to my athletic prowess. When I felt sad and lonely inside because of my lack of self-love, I would rise to competition where winning races brought praise, excitement, and rewards! I felt “worthy” performing in the physical world, so I trained harder and placed higher and higher. Plus, as I now know through meditation and pranayama breathing, athletes get that incredible “high” from oxygenating the body and brain.

I set my sights on winning a gold medal in the Winter Olympic Games – that was my dream. Shortly after making the US Ski Team, I went through a traumatic sexual experience, feeling incredible guilt and shame about the outcome. The repressed emotions affected my physical body and I struggled with injuries.

My life wasn’t all pain and suffering. I married an extraordinary husband, Casey, and had two delightful boys, Caelin and Aidan. There was a lot of playfulness and joy in life as a Mom. And I had a wonderful time raising children. I believe we attract what we need to work out in our life and mine was to look inside and free myself from all the repressed emotions from the past. I spent six years with chronic illness , and boy, did that hurt!

At age 35 I contracted Lyme disease. With no belief in a higher power, I suffered physically, psychologically and existentially until, in a moment of surrender, I said to the universe, “I can’t walk, I can’t cook, I can’t brush my teeth, I can’t sleep, and I may be in a wheel chair. I’m ok with that. I’m ok with never being an athlete again. I just want to watch my children grow up. I want to love. I will just be. Not be “Tara” the fabulous array of labels, just “Tara” who can love.” I had a remarkable burst of healing and spent several years getting better. My spirituality evolved and since the only time I’d feel good was being outside, I began to connect to the natural world. I was very weak and could only walk about ½ mile. I’d lay down and touch the earth, look up at the Winter crisp Vermont sky, and marvel at the vibrant, scrub brush needles of a pine tree or marsh grass tucked into the frozen ice of the lake across the road. I abandoned any religious beliefs because God, in the Catholic teachings, was more like an authoritative father figure who wagged his finger at me and said “You’re bad! You deserve this pain!” So I connected more to Great Spirit, the Native American word for God, that represented itself through nature as an energy that moved through everything.

I recovered from Lyme disease with the help of many extraordinary people in both the western alternative medical worlds, especially a remarkable Lyme doctor in Steamboat, one of the few who listened to me when I described all the symptoms of this very hard-to-diagnose illness. I also took a hiatus from my marriage for several months which helped me empower myself and redefine what a healthy relationship should be.

My second phase of “waking up” came through an ovarian tumor that made me quite sick for two years. On an evening walk in the Tetons, I looked up into the universe again and cried “God, please help me!” Remarkably, a second healing opportunity unfolded and I was diagnosed and had surgery to remove my reproductive organs and a lot of endometriosis that had grown all over my lower digestive tract. I decided to deal with any remaining emotional residue and worked with a psychotherapist to unlock all doors of inner trauma and let in the light.

Now it was time to really live! I felt extraordinary healthwise, and I had a renewed desire to compete again. I never forgot about my Olympic dream, even though, as I got older, I’d say, “oh well. In my next life maybe I’ll be an Olympian.” But on a serendipitous trip to the Salt Lake Olympics where the only tickets available were to the cross country ski events, I watched in awe and excitement as the women charged by me. Moving with such grace and power, these women awakened a deep resonance within my body and I felt a profound desire to pick up where I’d left of at the age of 17! I turned to my husband, sobbing, and said “I have to finish this!” My dream! I set my heart on the 2006 Turin, Italy Winter Olympic Games and began training my buns off!

I flew on skis! By embracing my true desire to race again, it was so easy for my body to get back into the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager! Actually I was much stronger this time around and lifted weights, trained sometimes twice a day, and skied and competed with the best skiers in the country. I landed in the top 10 in many of my races and was even listed as a hopeful for the Olympic team. This time around, I skied from my heart. Having lived through chronic illness, just having the opportunity to race again was humbling. I felt like a kid. At age 45, I was racing with women in their teens and 20’s! But the divine presence of the universe had other plans for me!

Two months short of the Olympic trials I was on a run in Salida, Colorado and stepped on a rattlesnake and got bit on my ankle. That night my leg swelled up so large that I couldn’t believe it didn’t pop like a helium balloon! Lying there in emergency room, looking at my beautiful, fat appendage, I knew that my ski adventure was over.

The Native Americans believe that being bit by a snake is a transmutation. A shedding of old skin for new. That it’s the energy of “wholeness, cosmic consciousness, and the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance.*” I was surely reborn to share my story and awaken to my higher purpose, helping others experience the remarkable wonder of healing.

It was with that intention in mind that I discovered, through a friend here in Carbondale, the Oneness University. The founders, Amma and Bhagavan, avatars of higher consciousness, teach people of all religions, faiths, and beliefs, about societal patterning and conditioning, and the ability of all of us to experience enlightened states of consciousness. The Level 1 and Level 2 Oneness process is an immersion into our unexperienced emotional past, and how the mind is triggered by old subconscious wounds that play out in our physical and energetic body. Through meditation and the Oneness blessing, a transfer of energy that leads to a neural-biological restructuring we dissolve our sense of being separate from the exterior world. This is not merely a psychological process but a change in perception.  It is the key to ending human suffering and to the establishing on earth of true and lasting peace and harmony not only between human and human but also between humanity and nature. I was surely reborn to share my story and awaken to my higher purpose, helping others heal through loving themselves. That is the teachings of "Oneness."


We are all patterned and conditioned by our parents and/or the primary relationships in our life when we come into the world. All of their physical and emotional pain is experienced by us, their children. And our pain is projected onto our own children, our partners, friends or family members because the "seeds" of our pain are simply unexperienced emotions from childhood. Without experiencing the feelings we were going through at the time, the mind continues to play the "story" of what happened. The external world re-triggers internal trauma until we dive deep into the physical "blocks" in our body and see what's going on in the inner world.


The Oneness process looks at the science of the mind, and our neuro-biology; how we're hard-wired for suffering. Through examining our relationships with ourselves and others, setting an intention that we want to bring our relationships to a higher level, asking for the grace to do this from our higher consciousness, then letting the higher power of the universe/God/Creator help us, we can manifest joy, prosperity, love and happiness in our life! Meditation and breath work are the foundation of this. Through relaxation and mindfulness we can experience a "deep listening" to the mind and the stories it is running constantly. Through breath work, yoga and chakra clearing (chakras are energy centers in the body), we release much of the "stuck" energy that presents itself in our subconscious as a "story" and we can heal the suffering from the past. It is through our own healing that others heal as well. And an integral part of this process is gratitude! "Feeling" grateful produces many beneficial physiological, psychological and emotional effects on the body, mind and spirit. Try it! It works!!!

And for more information or to get on my email for meditations at our kiva, write me at tara@tarasheahan.com!

"With inner integrity arises acceptance of oneself.
With acceptance of oneself arises love of oneself.
With acceptance of oneself arises the acceptance of the other.
With love for the other arises relationship.
Life is realtionship!"

Sri Amma and Sri Bhagavan, founders of Oneness University