By building up these narratives around our experiences, we distance ourselves from the experiences themselves. The narratives often devolve into harmful mantras about how we have to do more, do better, be better to make the pain stop. Even our good experiences are tainted with anxiety because we don’t simply accept them as they happen. Two Aspects of Radical Acceptance The core of Radical Acceptance is the friendly question. Imagine that you’re talking to a friend about how her day went. You’re not looking to pass judgment or make any changes, you’re just curious and looking for insight. A powerful example of this is seen in the following anecdote.

As you go through your day, pause occasionally to ask yourself, ‘This moment, do I accept myself just as I am?’ Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.” pg. 23 But acceptance does not equal complacency. A 2019 meta-analysis indicated that cancer patients who practiced acceptance-based behavior had less psychological distress while living with their condition.Thoughts of unworthiness also create feelings of isolation. When we don’t think that we’re good enough, we assume that others think the same thing. We find it hard to trust people who offer us love, friendship, or even simple encouragement. Letting Go of Perfection The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being ‘without anxiety about imperfection.’ This means accepting our human existence and all of life as it is. Imperfection is not our personal problem—it is a natural part of existing. We all get caught in wants and fears, we all act unconsciously, we all get diseased and deteriorate. When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.” pg. 21 This is also a lovely book, filled with poetry by Rumi, Rilke and others. Tara Brach is quite vulnerable in sharing her personal stories, which may or may not appeal to everyone, but you do not have to have a story line similar to hers to appreciate the teachings. I have tagged many passages and poems to return to. As an undergraduate at Clark University, Tara pursued a double major in psychology and political science. During this time, while working as a grassroots organizer for tenants’ rights, she also began attending yoga classes and exploring Eastern approaches to inner transformation. After college, she lived for ten years in an ashram—a spiritual community—where she practiced and taught both yoga and concentrative meditation. When she left the ashram and attended her first Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat, led by Joseph Goldstein, she realized she was home. “I had found wisdom teachings and practices that train the heart and mind in unconditional and loving presence,” she explains. “I knew that this was a path of true freedom.” I particularly appreciated the chapter on how to accept fear and the accompanying meditation guide for how to work through fear to a place of acceptance and power. It is a skill set I need to develop in a bad way before I go through childbirth in a few months. :)

When we overly focus on ourselves, chase what we think we want, and worry about the future, we cut ourselves off from the things that keep us most connected to ourselves and others. After all, life is our ability to be fully present in each moment, and to gracefully accept and revel in the beauty and pain of life as it unfolds moment to moment. Radical Acceptance is About Mindfulness and Compassion In our attempts to become “better,” we constantly observe and judge ourselves. We’re always on the lookout for imperfections; and, when we inevitably find some, it just drives us deeper into our sense of inadequacy.

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The wisdom in this story is that each of us is golden by nature; sometimes, we just need help chipping away at the mud and concrete. To discover our “Buddha nature,” we need to distinguish between "doing bad things" and being a "bad person."

So it is that life becomes a series of chases. We chase the next big thing and never appreciate our achievements in their entirety. Sadly our achievements often feel hollow because they don't give us the satisfaction of feeling worthy, accepted, and as if we belong. So how can we learn to accept ourselves and to strive towards a more affirmative, healing stance on what it means to be human? What Can We Learn From Buddhism? So far we’ve been mostly discussing mindfulness, or awareness of our moment-to-moment experiences. However, it’s important to remember that the second part of Radical Acceptance is compassion. Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork--all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.One of the things I like about this book is the many sources it draws on. It is personal, telling, for example, of joining an ashram and having a falling out with its leader, of a divorce, of difficulties in raising her son. It draws on her professional work, relating stories of exchanges that, as a psychotherapist, she has had with her clients. And most of all it is literary, skillfully so. She retells and interprets stories from the tradition, as well as anecdotes from contemporary American life, all to the end of introducing the outlines of a kind of consciousness she calls "Radical Acceptance." The image of the Buddha seated under the bodhi tree is one of the great mythic symbols depicting the power of the pause. Siddhartha was no longer clinging to pleasure or running away from any part of his experience. He was making himself absolutely available to the changing stream of life. This attitude of neither grasping nor pushing away any experience has come to be known as the Middle Way, and it characterizes the engaged presence we awaken in pausing. In the pause, we, like Siddhartha, become available to whatever life brings us, including the unfaced, unfelt parts of our psyche.” pg. 60