The Voices Behind ZenSoul
ZenSoul is built around a simple idea: meditation guidance should come from people who actually practice. Every article on this site is written by someone who has done the work. The uncomfortable morning sits, the retreats, the study. This page introduces the two writers who make that possible.
Nora Hale: Founder and Lead Writer
Nora is a certified yoga teacher (Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, 200h RYT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) practitioner based in Portland, Oregon. She came to meditation not as a spiritual seeker, but as someone who needed to learn how to sleep again. A burnout in her late twenties, working in marketing, broke what discipline alone couldn’t fix.
What started as a survival tool became a complete reorientation. After completing her yoga teacher training in 2020 and leaving her corporate job in 2021, she launched ZenSoul to share what had worked and, equally important, what hadn’t.
Nora writes about meditation scripts, guided practices, and the physical tools that support a consistent practice. She cites scientific sources when making health or efficacy claims and is explicit about the limits of her expertise: she’s a practitioner and teacher, not a therapist.
Nora’s practice: Daily Vipassana sits, 20-40 minutes. Occasional MBSR group sessions. Kripalu yoga three times a week.
Specialties: Meditation scripts, mindfulness technique, sleep and anxiety practices, meditation space design.
Tara Quinn: Contributing Writer
Tara is a freelance interior designer based in Austin, Texas, who arrived at meditation through a completely unexpected door: the challenge of designing a space that actually felt calm. Working on a home office project during a particularly chaotic period, she became obsessed with the relationship between physical environment and mental state. She started meditating to test whether her design decisions were actually working.
Six years later, she still practices. Her designer’s eye shapes everything she covers: the quality of materials, how a room’s proportions affect presence, which meditation products are worth the investment and which are purely decorative.
Tara covers the home design and product side of ZenSoul. Meditation rooms, garden spaces, decor, crystals, candles, and the physical environment of practice. Where Nora writes from the practitioner’s perspective, Tara writes from the designer’s.
Tara’s practice: 15-20 minutes most mornings, usually with a guided track. Evening walks as moving meditation.
Specialties: Meditation space design, product curation, home wellness environments, gift guides.