Radical Acceptance

📚 Book Review: Radical Acceptance

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
— Tara Brach, quoting Carl Rogers

📖 Book Metadata

  • Title: Radical Acceptance
  • Subtitle: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
  • Author: Tara Brach, Ph.D.
  • Year of Publication: 2003
  • Number of Pages: 352
  • ISBN: 978-0553380996

📑 Chapters Overview

  1. The Trance of Unworthiness
  2. Awakening from the Trance
  3. The Sacred Pause
  4. The Power of Yes
  5. Unconditional Friendliness
  6. Opening Our Heart in the Face of Fear
  7. Awakening Compassion for Ourselves
  8. Seeing the Realness of Suffering
  9. Holding Our Suffering with a Forgiving Heart
  10. Recognizing Our Basic Goodness
  11. A Path of True Refuge

đŸ–‹ïž Overview

Radical Acceptance is a blend of Buddhist wisdom, Western psychology, and heart-centered mindfulness practice. In this transformative book, clinical psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach introduces the concept of “Radical Acceptance” — the practice of embracing ourselves, just as we are, with compassion and awareness.

She argues that many people live in a “trance of unworthiness,” believing they are fundamentally flawed or not good enough. By learning to meet every moment — and every part of ourselves — with openness and compassion, we awaken from this trance and begin to live with genuine freedom and presence.

🔬 Main Science (Relation with Psychological Theories)

Brach’s work is grounded in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, self-compassion research, and trauma healing. Drawing from neuroscience, Buddhist psychology, and somatic awareness, she demonstrates how nonjudgmental presence can regulate the nervous system, reduce shame, and enhance emotional resilience.

Her framework aligns with the teachings of Jon Kabat-Zinn (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion), and Carl Rogers (Unconditional Positive Regard), integrating psychological depth with spiritual clarity.

💡 Practical Takeaways

  • Pause and Breathe: Use the “Sacred Pause” to interrupt habitual self-judgment and reactivity.
  • Label the Trance: Simply naming the inner voice of “not good enough” begins to disempower it.
  • RAIN Technique: A foundational practice for healing emotional pain:
    • Recognize what is happening
    • Allow the experience to be there
    • Investigate with interest and care
    • Nurture with self-compassion
  • Somatic Awareness: Tune into the body as a gateway to emotional healing.
  • Forgiveness: Not to excuse others, but to release yourself from the burden of resentment.
  • Compassion Is a Practice: Self-kindness is not indulgent; it’s the soil from which all healing grows.

💬 Best Quotes

  • “Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same patterns.”
  • “You are the one who can bring the kindness and acceptance you long for.”
  • “Pain is inevitable, but the suffering that arises from resistance is optional.”
  • “You can’t get rid of the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
  • “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

🌟 Conclusion

Radical Acceptance is a deeply compassionate and liberating book. Tara Brach invites readers to stop striving for perfection and instead rest in the truth of their own goodness. With gentle honesty and profound spiritual insight, she maps a path out of self-aversion and into embodied freedom.

Whether you’re struggling with shame, anxiety, grief, or emotional numbness, this book offers not only healing but also a blueprint for living with presence, love, and peace.

📚 Similar Books

  • 📘 The Gifts of Imperfection by BrenĂ© Brown
  • 📗 Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff
  • 📕 Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
  • 📙 The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
  • 📔 The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chödrön

💭 “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves.”
— Tara Brach

🌿 Highly recommended for those seeking emotional healing, self-compassion, and the freedom to live with clarity and wholeness. 🌿

Chapters overview

Chapter 1: The trance of unwhorthiness

  • Accept “Something is wrong with me”. The trance of unworthiness
    • The repeated dreams of trying to reach something and not being able to.
    • Strategies:
      • Embark on perpetual self-improvement
      • hold back and play safe
      • withdraw from the NOW
      • Keep busy
      • become our worst critics
      • Focus on others’ faults.
    • First Buddha truth: Suffering is universal and comes from the mistake to think that we are a separate and distinct self.
      • Freedom is to be “without anxiety of imperfection”
    • Do I accept my body, mind, emotions, moods, and behaviours as they are?
    • What do you want people to see/perceive about you?
    • As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.

Chapter 2: Awake from trance

  • The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.

  • This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it.

  • A physical pain, such as a backache or a migraine, might turn into a commentary on how we don’t know how to take care of ourselves, how we don’t eat well or exercise enough. The pain might make us feel like a victim; it might tell us we can’t count on our body, that things will always go wrong. In the same way, we amplify emotional pain with our judgments and stories. Feeling fear or anger or jealousy means something is wrong with us, that we are weak or bad.

  • Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment. Our trance deepens as we move through the day driven by “I have to do more to be okay” or “I am incomplete; I need more to be happy.” These “mantras” reinforce the trance-belief that our life should be different from what it is.

  • Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.

  • Unfolding the wings of acceptance

    • The two parts of genuine acceptance— seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion —are as interdependent as the two wings of a great bird. Together, they enable us to fly and be free.
    • When we are mindful of fear, for instance, we are aware that our thoughts are racing, that our body feels tight and shaky, that we feel compelled to flee—and we recognize all this without trying to manage our experience in any way, without pulling away.
    • Instead of resisting our feelings of fear or grief, we embrace our pain with the kindness of a mother holding her child. Rather than judging or indulging our desire for attention or chocolate or sex, we regard our grasping with gentleness and care. Compassion honors our experience; it allows us to be intimate with the life of this moment as it is. Compassion makes our acceptance wholehearted and complete.
    • If we are rejected by someone we love, the trance of unworthiness may ensnare us in obsessive thinking, blaming the one who hurt us and at the same time believing that we were jilted because we are defective. We may feel caught in a relentless swing between explosive anger and wrenching grief and shame
    • Acceptance helps us to heal and move on, free from unconscious habits of self-hatred and blame.
    • become aware of the consequences of our actions, as they affect both ourselves and others. In Buddhist psychology, including this larger view in an accepting awareness is called “clear comprehension.”
    • The larger view offered by clear comprehension invariably leads us back to our deepest intention. We don’t want to suffer or cause suffering.
    • The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening. The very nature of our heart is to care.

  • Facing the anguish of trance

  • The suffering that open us to radical acceptance

  • Common misunderstandings about RadAcc

    • Is not resignation
    • Radical Acceptance does not mean defining ourselves by our limitations. It is not an excuse for withdrawal.
      • By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life will unfold, we open ourselves to hope so that we can move forward with vitality and will.
    • Radical Acceptance is not self-indulgence
    • Radical Acceptance does not make us passive.
    • Radical Acceptance doesn’t mean accepting a “self.”

  • On the path of the buddha: Discovering the freedom or RadAcc

    • In contrast to orthodox notions of climbing up a ladder seeking perfection, psychologist Carl Jung describes the spiritual path as an unfolding into wholeness.
    • Rather than trying to vanquish waves of emotion and rid ourselves of an inherently impure self, we turn around and embrace this life in all its realness—broken, messy, mysterious and vibrantly alive.
    • When a harsh self-judgment appeared, I could recognize it simply as a passing thought. It might be a tenacious and regular visitor, but realizing it wasn’t truth was wonderfully liberating. When I got lost in feelings of insecurity or loneliness, I found that the lovingkindness and compassion meditations could guide me back to that tenderness I had felt in the desert sanctuary. I was no longer striving to rid myself of pain, rather I was learning to relate to the suffering I felt with care.
    • The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.
    • I realized that any argument I had with life—from a slight self-criticism to the utter anguish of shame—separated me from the love and awareness that are my true home.

Chapter 3: The sacred pause-resting

  • Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance.
    • A pause is, by nature, time limited. We resume our activities, but we do so with increased presence and more ability to make choices.
    • But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.
    • But much of our driven pace and habitual controlling in daily life does not serve surviving, and certainly not thriving. It arises from a free-floating anxiety about something being wrong or not enough. Even when our fear arises in the face of actual failure, loss or—like the military pilots—death, our instinctive tensing and striving are often ineffectual and unwise.
    • 
return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment—even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.” Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.
  • Running away deepens the Trance
    • Because we want to be accepted and loved, we try to fashion and present a self that will attract others and secure our belonging. But we inevitably express our natural aggression or neediness or fear—parts of our emotional makeup that frequently are taboo—and the significant people in our life react to us. Whether we are mildly scolded, ignored or traumatically rejected, on some level we are hurt and pushed away.
    • The shadow becomes a force in our psyche as we regularly exile the emotions that could elicit rejection from others. We might bury and forget our childlike excitement; ignore our anger until it becomes knots of tension in our body; cover our fears with endless self-judgment and blame. Our shadow is rooted in shame, bound by our sense of being basically defective.
    • Yet by running from what we fear, we feed the inner darkness. Whenever we reject a part of our being, we are confirming to ourselves our fundamental unworthiness. Underneath “I shouldn’t get so angry” lies “There’s something wrong with me if I do.”
    • As happens in any addiction, the behaviors we use to keep us from pain only fuel our suffering. Not only do our escape strategies amplify the feeling that something is wrong with us, they stop us from attending to the very parts of ourselves that most need our attention to heal. As Carl Jung states in one of his key insights, the unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering.
  • When we stop running: Become available to the life of the moment
    • In Sanskrit, mara means “delusion,” the dreamlike ignorance that entangles us in craving and fear and obscures our enlightened nature.
  • Pausing in the face of Mara
  • The Sacred Pause - Fertile ground for wise action
  • Precious moments of Freedom

Chapter 4: Unconditional Friendliness: The spirit of Radacc

  • Intro
    • Rumi: The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
    • Nothing is wrong — whatever is happening is just “real life.” Such unconditional friendliness is the spirit of Radical Acceptance.
    • Seeing what is true, we hold what is seen with kindness.
    • We are learning to make friends with ourselves, our life, at the most profound level possible.
  • I see you mara: The practices of inquiry and naming
    • One tool of mindfulness that can cut through our numbing trance is inquiry. As we ask ourselves questions about our experience,
      • Inquiry is not a kind of analytic digging—we are not trying to figure out, “Why do I feel this sadness?” This would only stir up more thoughts.
    • Example:
      • I might be feeling like a bad mother because I lashed out at Narayan for repeated interruptions while I was working.
        • When I pause and ask myself what wants to be accepted, I drop below the self-judgment to tiredness and anxiety.
        • I can feel my stomach contract, my face tighten. This is a familiar feeling—fear.
      • As I sit with it, I become aware that I’m afraid of not having the energy to get everything done, afraid of failing.
      • This fear that has hardened my heart is what now needs my attention.
        • The moment I recognize Mara, some of the power of that fear lessens, and with it, the self-judgment.
        • I am not so caught in my assumed identity as a stressed, striving and potentially deficient person.
      • While my worries might not go away, if Narayan does dare to appear again, I am more likely to meet him with affection than with irritation.
    • It is important to approach inquiry with a genuine attitude of unconditional friendliness.
    • Naming or noting is another tool of traditional mindfulness practice
      • The simple action of having named the anxiety building before my talk opens my awareness. Anxiety may still be present, but the care and wakefulness I cultivate through noting allows me to feel more at home with myself.
    • The practices of inquiry and noting are actually ways to wake us up to the fact that we are suffering. Caught up in our stories, we can effectively deny the truth of our experience.
    • Recognizing that we are suffering is freeing—self-judgment falls away and we can regard ourselves with kindness.
  • Inviting mara to Tea: The practice of saying yes.
    • We bring alive the spirit of Radical Acceptance when, instead of resisting emotional pain, we are able to say yes to our experience.
    • Saying yes is not a way of manipulating our experience, but rather an aid to opening to life as it is.
    • If we say yes to a feeling of sadness, for instance, it might swell into full-blown grieving. Yet regardless of how our experience unfolds, by agreeing to what is here, we offer it the space to express and move through us.
    • We might not have the balance or resiliency in a particular moment to meet our experience with unconditional friendliness, and our attempts at yes might actually end up flooding us with fear. It would be better instead to find a way to alleviate the fear, perhaps by seeking comfort with a friend, doing vigorous exercise or taking prescribed medication.
    • Thich Nhat Hanh calls his practice of yes “smile yoga.” He suggests bringing a slight but real smile to our lips many times throughout the day, whether we are meditating or simply stopping for a red light.
      • A smile is the yes of unconditional friendliness that welcomes experience without fear.
  • Saying yes to our life
    • Our practice of saying yes is not limited to our immediate experience. We can say yes to the whole life we are living. Yes to our friendships, to our parenting, to our physical appearance, to our personality, to our work, to our spiritual path. However, because we are usually shooting for perfection, when we step back to take a look at “how we’re doing,” we often feel as if our life isn’t turning out quite right. Mara appears, casting a shadow over the goodness and value of how we live.
    • When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
  • Guided Meditation
    • The power of yes
    • Facing difficulty and naming what is true
      • How am I feeling about this?
      • Is this true?
      • Planning, obsessing, fantasizing,
    • Embracing life with a smile

Chapter 5: Coming home to our body: The ground of Radacc

  • Anger: All our strategies of trying to control life through blaming or withdrawing are aimed at keeping us from the raw experience of just such a moment.
  • With anger, the body tightens, the chest fills with an explosive feeling of pressure. With fear, we might feel the grip of knots in our stomach, the constriction in our chest or throat. If shame arises, our face burns, our shoulders slump, we feel a physical impulse to shrink back, to hide. Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life.
  • This is how an embodied presence awakens us from a trance: We free ourselves at the ground level from the reactivity that perpetuates our suffering. When we meet arising sensations with Radical Acceptance, instead of losing ourselves in grasping and resisting, we begin the process of freeing ourselves from the stories that separate us. We taste the joy of being fully present, alive and connected with all of life. This was the Buddha’s promise: Mindfulness of the body leads to happiness in this life, and the fullness of spiritual awakening.
  •   Neutral is our signal to disengage and turn our attention elsewhere, which usually means to an experience that is more intense or stimulating.
  • Only when we realize we can’t hold on to anything can we begin to relax our efforts to control our experience.
  • Sensations are always changing and moving. If we habitually interrupt and constrict their natural process of unfolding and transformation by resisting them or trying to hold on to them, by tightening against them in our body or telling ourselves stories, it’s like damming up or diverting the course of a river. It’s easy to let the river flow when sensations are pleasant. But when they’re not, when we’re in emotional or physical pain, we contract, pull away. Seeing this and learning how to meet pain with Radical Acceptance is one of the most challenging and liberating of practices.
  • Reacting to pain with fear: Something is wrong
  • Traumatic Fear: Dissociating from our body
    • Not wanting to feel the humiliation of being dropped, she usually broke off the relationship at the first signs that things were going downhill.
    • When she was going through one of her regular bouts of anxiety she’d either act as if she “had it all together” or disappear for a while.
    • Often the only way Rosalie could spend time with people was by getting stoned. Marijuana made everything seem okay for the time being. But, she told me, now she needed to get high every night before bed in order to sleep through the night. If she didn’t smoke a joint or take sleeping pills, she’d wake up in the middle of the night in a fit of terror. The dream was always the same—she was hiding in a small dark place and someone beastly and insane was about to find her.
    • Unprocessed pain keeps our system of self-preservation on permanent alert. In addition to sudden intrusive memories, a wide range of situations, many nonthreatening, may activate the alarmingly high levels of pain and fear stored in our body. Our partner might raise her voice in irritation, and the full force of our past wounds—all the terror or rage or hurt that lives in our body—can be unleashed. Whether or not there is any present danger, we feel absolutely at risk and compelled to find a way to get away from this pain.
  • Healing our wounds
    • In both Buddhist psychology and Western experiential therapy, this process of experiencing and accepting the changing stream of sensations is central to the alchemy of transformation. Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. If we bring a steady attention to the immediate physical experience of an emotion, past sensations and stories linked to it that have been locked in our body and mind are “de-repressed.” Layers of historic hurt, fear or anger may begin to play themselves out in the light of awareness.
    • Learning to bring Radical Acceptance to our physical experience is usually a gradual process.
    • If overwhelming sensations arise during our day, we might listen to music, talk with a friend or read a novel. When we encounter an especially rough patch, we may need the support of a meditation teacher, healer or therapist to help us hold our experience with presence and care.
  • Letting life live through us

Chapter 6: Radacc of Desire: Awakening to the source of Longing

  • Years later I would realize that the Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
    • Eventually I would find that relating wisely to the powerful and pervasive energy of desire is a pathway into unconditional loving.
    • It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.
    • While often uncomfortable, desire is not bad—it is natural.
    • The same life energy that leads to suffering also provides the fuel for profound awakening. Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are.
    • The Buddha guided us to relate to desire without getting possessed by it and without resisting it.
    • The catch is that no matter how gratifying any experience may be, it is bound to change.
    • Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.
    • We want to feel “good enough” all the time in our work, parenting, relationships, health, appearance, and life. We want others to be a certain way—always happy, healthy, loving and respectful toward us. Yet because these things don’t happen, we are driven by the feeling that something is missing or wrong.
  • The emergence of a wanting self
    • The need to be “number one” extended to dating, friendship and work. Unless he was the center of attention, he felt he was being overlooked or rejected. Admitting this in our therapy sessions was embarrassing—he felt something was wrong with him for being so dependent on outside recognition.
    • When the answer to our need and desire is no, the physical sensations of contraction we experience are intense. We feel shame—the desire to hide—and the danger of fear. When we experience this wanting and not getting over and over, we make an enduring association: Our wanting leads to fear and shame. This intense cluster of reactive feelings, locked in the body, forms the energetic core of a wanting self.
    • If, like Chris, our needs for connection are consistently ignored or misunderstood, our wanting grows stronger, and we seek even more urgently the attention we crave. We spend our lives trying to get away from our painful feelings of fear and shame, disconnecting from and numbing our body, getting lost in self-judgment and obsessive thinking. But this only serves to increase our wanting and shame. As the cycle of reactivity repeats itself over and over, our identity as a wanting self—fundamentally deprived, isolated and unworthy—deepens.
    • When we can’t meet our emotional needs directly, the wanting self develops strategies for satisfying them with substitutes. Like all strategies underlying the trance of unworthiness, those aimed at winning love and respect absorb and fixate our attention.
    • We often try to satisfy our emotional needs with the more immediate pleasures of food, alcohol and drugs. When they “work,” these strategies provide immediate gratification through a temporary surge of pleasant sensations. They also numb or cover over the raw pain of shame and fear. But because they don’t genuinely address our needs, our suffering continues and with it our reliance on whatever provides pleasure or relief.
    • Our most regularly used strategies to get what we want also become a defining part of our sense of self. The overeating, the competing, the people pleasing, feel like me. As we immerse ourselves in the life-consuming pursuit of substitutes, we become increasingly alienated from our authentic desires, our deepest longings for love and belonging.
  • Lost in the pursuit of substitutes
    • Feeling self-centered and bad about myself for workaholism doesn’t slow me down. “Getting one more thing out of the way” seems the most reliable way to get what I want—to feel better.
    • While having a job is usually necessary to meet our basic survival needs, where and how we work is also a key domain for substitute gratification: Work becomes an indirect means for trying to win love and respect. We might find what we do entirely meaningless, we might hate or resent our job, yet still hitch our desire for approval and connection to how well we perform.
    • Even when we are engaged in activities that are meaningful to us, that are creatively and spiritually gratifying, they can be “co-opted” and used to satisfy the unmet needs of the wanting self.
  • When addictive wanting takes over our life
    • If we have been acutely frustrated or deprived, our fixated desire becomes desperate and unquenchable. We are possessed by craving, and our entire life is hijacked by the force of this energy.
    • We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.
    • While we often don’t like ourselves when caught in wanting, this dislike turns to full-blown aversion when wanting gets out of control and takes over our life.
    • When we hate ourselves for wanting, it is because the wanting self has taken over our entire life.
    • Desperate to get away from the pain of self-hatred, we send cruel and unforgiving messages to our wanting self. We may try to punish our wanting self by depriving ourselves
    • We remain out of touch with the longing for love that drives our addiction in the first place.
  • Rejecting the wanting Self
    • We are encouraged by our culture to keep ourselves comfortable, to be right, to possess things, to be better than others, to look good, to be admired. We are also told that we should feel ashamed of our selfishness, that we are flawed for being so self-centered, sinful when we are indulgent.
    • As the monk in the Zen tale shows, if we push away desire, we disconnect from our tenderness and we harden against life. We become like a “rock in winter.” When we reject desire, we reject the very source of our love and aliveness.
  • It is not my fault
    • In bringing a clear and comprehensive awareness to our situation, we begin to accept our wanting self with compassion. This frees us to move forward, to break out of old patterns.
  • Awakening from the wanting self
    • While these tendencies may persist, they often unfold to reveal complexes of wanting and shame that, in the light of mindfulness, relax their hold on us.
      • Nonetheless, with time, although such wanting may continue to arise, even its most compelling and tenacious expressions need not lead to suffering. The sensations of anxiety and wanting may be unpleasant, but as we saw with pain, the suffering can be optional. We suffer when our experience of desire or craving defines and confines our experience of who we are.
    • If we meet the sensations, emotions and thoughts of wanting with Radical Acceptance, we begin to awaken from the identity of a wanting self and to reconnect with the fullness of our being.
  • What we really want
    • Through his years of intensive training, Milarepa learns that suffering only comes from being seduced by the demons or from trying to fight them. To discover freedom in their presence, he has to experience them directly and wakefully, as they are.
    • As Pema Chödrön puts it: “When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.”
    • No longer avoiding my immediate experience, I would find myself filled with waves of excitement, sexual arousal, and fear. Now, instead of resisting these feelings as demons, I just practiced accepting them and, with some curiosity, exploring them further.
    • The pressing ache in my chest opened into a deep grief—grief for all the lost moments of love, moments that I missed because I was too preoccupied or busy to stop and open to them. I moved back and forth between erotic passion and this profound grieving about how separate I felt from what I really longed for.
    • The Buddha taught that by being aware of desire, we free ourselves from identifying with it. With Radical Acceptance, we begin to shed the layers of shame and aversion we have built around our “deficient, wanting self.” We see through the stories we have created—stories about a self who is a victim of desire, about a self who is fighting desire, about a self who tumbles into unhealthy desires, about a self who has to have something more, something different from what is right here, right now.
    • Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging. The more times we traverse this path—feeling the loneliness or craving, and inhabiting its immensity—the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself. Our longings don’t disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.
  • Guided Reflection: “Not Doing” When We Feel Driven by Wanting
    • Because all experience keeps changing, with time even cravings that have felt irresistible can eventually dissolve. While desire naturally arises again, the wisdom of seeing that everything passes is liberating. Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
  • Guided Reflection: Discovering Your Deepest Longing
    • When we bring our myriad wants into the light of awareness, beneath them we find a deep and authentic wellspring of spiritual yearning. These core longings guide us on the path of awakening and freedom.
    • “What does my heart long for?” “What really matters? What do I most care about?”
      • Be patient and relaxed—with time, as you listen to your heart, your deepest longing will emerge. This longing might be expressed as the longing for love, presence, peace, communion, harmony, beauty, truth or freedom.

Chapter 7: Opening our heart in the face of fear

  • While all physical and emotional pain is unpleasant, the pain of fear can feel unbearable. When we are gripped by fear, nothing else exists. Our most contracted and painful sense of self is hitched to the feelings and stories of fear, to our ways of resisting fear.
  • What is fear?
    • Fear is the anticipation of future pain. The basic function of fear is to assure survival. Each animal has one-pointed focus for survival and self-preservation. Only in mammals do cognition and memory interact with affect to create the emotion of fear.
    • The emotion of fear arises with any threat to our well-being, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. It can guide us to respond in a healthy way or, as we each have experienced, entrap us in the trance of fear.
    • The ultimate loss—the one underlying all those smaller losses I’m afraid of—is loss of life itself.
    • The problem is: The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.
  • Caught in the trance of fear
    • Because the trance of fear arises from feeling cut off in relationships, we continue to feel fundamentally unsafe until we begin to experience with others some of the love and understanding we needed as children.
  • The safety of belonging with others
    • In facing intense fear, we need to be reminded that we are part of something larger than our own frightened self. In the safe haven of belonging to others we can begin to discover the sanctuary of peace that dwells within our own being.
  • Taking Refuge: Finding the inner source of safety and belonging.
    • In Buddhism, the three fundamental refuges are the Buddha (our awakened nature), the dharma (the path or the way) and the sangha (the community of spiritual aspirants)
    • The true power of Buddha’s story, the power that has kept it alive for all these centuries, rests in the fact that it demonstrates what is possible for each of us.
  • Meditation and medication
    • There are no absolute recipes for the process of waking up from the trance of fear. In making choices on our path, it is important to ask ourselves whether or not they will serve awakening and freedom. Our best answers are found by honestly looking into our intentions. What is our intention in doing therapy, in taking medication or doing a particular style of meditation? Are we using meditation as a way of escaping from painful relationships or unwanted responsibilities? Do we truly intend to face and accept fear? Are our choices helping us relax and become more kind? As we seek pathways to safety, we ask these questions and then experiment to see what works.
  • Widening the lens of attention: Making room for fear
    • Being genuinely awake in the midst of fear requires the willingness to actively contact the sensations of fear. This intentional way of engaging with fear I call “leaning into fear.”
  • Leaning into fear
    • When we begin to face fear by focusing on sensations, what often happens is our mind immediately produces a story. We might get lost in our plans on how to respond to a frightening situation. Or we might fixate on fearful beliefs and assumptions: “I’m afraid I am a failure,”
    • The key to awakening from the bonds of fear is to move from our mental stories into immediate contact with the sensations of fear—the squeezing, pressing, burning, trembling, quaking, jittering life in our body. In fact, the story—as long as we remain awake and don’t get stuck in it—can become a useful gateway to the raw fear itself. While the mind will continue to generate stories about what we fear, we can recognize the thoughts for what they are and drop under them again and again to connect with the feelings in our body.
    • When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.
    • When the trance of fear arises, instead of getting caught up in worrying or looking for something to eat, instead of getting busy and trying to fix things, we can choose to lean in. Naturally there are times when fear is too strong and we don’t feel safe enough to engage with it. If we are feeling contracted and small, we may first need to widen the lens of awareness before bringing our full attention to fear. But in those moments when we can courageously lie down on the icy couch of fear and allow ourselves to experience its sharp edges, we are carried into the love and awareness that are beyond the reach of fear.
  • The gift of fear
  • Our ultimate refuge
    • As long as we are alive, we feel fear.

Chapter 8: Awakening compassion for ourselves

  • We often distance ourselves from emotional pain—our vulnerability, anger, jealousy, fear—by covering it over with self-judgment. When we push away parts of ourselves, we only dig ourselves deeper into the trance of unworthiness
We cannot be accepting of our experience if our heart has hardened in fear and blame
Compassion means to be with, feel with, suffer with.
  • Holding ourselves with compassion
  • Reaching out for compassion
  • May this suffering awaken compassion
  • We are holder and held
    • Understanding that the pain in our life is an expression of universal suffering opens us to the fullness of Radical Acceptance. Rather than being a problem, our depression, fear and anger are “entrusted to us,” and can be dedicated to our awakening.
  • Compassion begins with the capacity to hold your own life with a loving heart.

Chapter 9: Widening the circles of compassion

  • Intro
    • Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti wrote that “to pay attention means we care, which means we really love.” Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.
    • Feeling loved and loving matters to us beyond all else. We feel most “who we are” when we feel connected to each other and the world around us, when our hearts are open, generous and filled with love. Even when our hearts feel tight or numb, we still care about caring.
    • As Gandhi found, only by dedicating ourselves to some form of intentional training can we dissolve this tendency and embrace all beings with Radical Acceptance.
    • To accept ourselves and others with unconditional compassion means recognizing both the pure awareness that is our essence and our natural human vulnerability.
    • Up until this point in the book, we have been exploring how to bring the mindfulness and compassion of Radical Acceptance to our inner life. Just as we awaken compassion for ourselves by touching our own fear, anger and grief, when we bring clear attention to the vulnerability of others, our hearts become open and tender. Compassion for ourselves naturally leads to compassion for others.
    • May my life be of benefit to all beings.
  • We are in this together
  • Living in a world where everyone is real
    • When the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness,” he is expressing his commitment to live with the unconditionally open and loving heart of compassion.
    • Even if we don’t push others away with anger or hatred, we can easily overlook people and unknowingly withhold our kindness.
  • What do we do when our hear shuts down?
    • Tom would stay after each meeting, asking me questions that seemed unnecessary or commenting at length on that evening’s session. During the group sessions it was clear that he was also provoking resentment from others. As Tom began telling me what was wrong with the particular combination of people—overly sensitive women; passive, emotionally repressed men—my irritation spiked.As Tom and I continued talking, part of my attention went inward. I could see that behind my intolerance was a feeling of being violated. He was taking my time, preventing others from feeling safe in the group and speaking disparagingly about group members. As I felt the heat and swelling pressure of anger in my chest, I started turning on myself. “I’m supposed to be helping him, not reacting to him . . . he’s the one who’s really suffering.” But as I noticed how agitated I was feeling, I realized I was suffering too. Gently I told myself, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Simply acknowledging this pain helped me to relax and remember to send a message to my own heart: “I care about this suffering.”
    • I had stepped out of my angry superiority and returned home to feeling connected and tender.
    • Father Theophane’s question, “What do they really need?”
    • While Tom’s initial insensitivity had made him the lightning rod for blame, once he opened up, others could acknowledge that the hurt, fear or anger they’d expressed had little or nothing to do with Tom.
  • Seeing through each other eyes
    • Sometimes the very people we are closest to become unreal to us. We might easily assume we know what life is like for them and forget that, like us, they are always changing, their experience is always new.
    • We don’t have to do the formal process of role reversal in order to understand how life is for our spouse or child, sister or friend. We can imagine how it would feel to be in this person’s body and mind, living in his or her circumstances. As we allow ourselves to fully open to their conscious and vulnerable being, we feel naturally close and tender.
    • The more fully we offer our attention, the more deeply we realize that what matters most in life is being kind.
  • The Circle of all Beings
    • “Go to where no one can see, and kill the chicken.”
    • Rather, our aspiration to be of benefit arises from the radical realization that we all belong to the web of life, and that everything that happens within it affects everything else.
    • While it is easy to get caught up in believing we should be doing something more or different, what really matters is that we care. As Mother Teresa teaches, “We can do no great things—only small things with great love.”
  • Guided Meditation: Tonglen - Awakening the Heart of Compassion.
    • Breathe in the feelings of fear or numbness, touching them fully. Breathe out forgiveness, offering the resistance into the spaciousness of awareness.

Chapter 10: Recognizing our basic goodness: The gateway to a forgiving and loving heart

  • With deep resentment, we build a case against them, often with enough evidence to prove we should eliminate them from our life altogether. The word resentment means “to feel again.” Each time we repeat to ourselves a story of how we’ve been wronged, we feel again in our body and mind the anger at being violated. But often enough our resentment of others reflects our resentment of ourselves.
    • Especially when things seem to be falling apart—we lose a job, suffer a serious injury, become estranged from a loved one—our lives can become painfully bound by the experience that something is wrong with us.
    • Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa writes, “. . . every human being has a basic nature of goodness.” Basic goodness is the radiance of our Buddha nature—it is our intrinsic wakefulness and love.
    • But in sharp contrast to our cultural conditioning as heirs of Adam and Eve, the Buddhist perspective holds that there is no such thing as a sinful or evil person. When we harm ourselves or others, it is not because we are bad but because we are ignorant. To be ignorant is to ignore the truth that we are connected to all of life, and that grasping and hatred create more separation and suffering. To be ignorant is to ignore the purity of awareness and capacity for love that expresses our basic goodness.
    • Romaine Rolland says, “There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.”
    • The Radical Acceptance at the center of these practices depends upon a leap of faith. Our trance thoughts may tell us that something is wrong, but we dare to let go of them and trust in the possibility of goodness. Our body may be filled with painful emotions, but instead of running away, we entrust ourselves to the healing power of compassionate presence. We may have protected ourselves by closing our heart, but instead, for the sake of love, we refuse to push anyone, including ourselves, out of our heart. When we are willing to leap, our faith is not disappointed, for when we peel off the layers of delusion, we find the goodness and love that are always there.
  • Forgiving ourselves: Releasing the blame that binds our Heart
    • Whether our anger and resentment is directed at another or at ourselves, the result is the same—it removes us from the deeper pain of our hurt and shame. As long as we avoid these feelings, we remain trapped in our armor, locked away from love for ourselves and others.
    • As we have seen over and over, the way out begins with Radical Acceptance of our pain.
    • No matter what appears—burning rage, gnawing anxiety, cruel thoughts or utter despondency—by offering forgiveness directly to each, we give permission to our inner life to be as it is. Rather than forgiving a “self,” we forgive the experiences we are identified with.
    • We can’t punish ourselves into being a good person.
  • Learning to see our own goodness
    • Sometimes though, the idea of appreciating myself can feel awkward or self-serving. When this is the case, it feels more honest to acknowledge my basic desire to be happy, to recognize that I, like all human beings, long to be loved, yearn to feel my goodness.
  • The blessing of feeling forgiven
  • Forgiving others: not pushing anyone out of our heart
    • Our intention and willingness to forgive, to let go of resentment and blame, does not mean that we excuse harmful behaviors or allow further injury. When we forgive, we stop rigidly identifying others by their undesirable behavior.
  • Seeing the goodness in others
  • Awakening the heart of lovingkidness
    • While it can be very hard to send wishes of lovingkindness to those we have difficulty with, by doing so we enlarge the capacity of our hearts to love unconditionally.
    • Matt loved his mother dearly, but her insecurity and neediness sometimes “gave him the willies,” as he put it. She had relied on him throughout his adult life to reassure her that she was doing okay, that she was making good decisions, that she was all right. Matt moved to the other side of the country, partly to get away from her. He’d visit her regularly and always showed up when needed, but he often found himself pushing her away when they were together, pulling out of an overwarm embrace, keeping his personal life to himself.
      • She would beg him to stay, telling him how afraid she was to die, afraid she wouldn’t go to heaven. He’d do what he could to comfort her, but as he told me, “Honestly, Tara, I feel like she’s pulling me into a black hole. Sometimes I wish she’d just die already.”
      • By simply offering care, our care begins to wake up.
      • Mother, may you be happy. May you feel peaceful. May you feel filled with lovingkindness.” Some days he’d just repeat over and over, “May you accept yourself just as you are.”
      • Day by day, Matt found he was spontaneously remembering a little of what he appreciated about his mother.
      • But he felt a genuine willingness to be at her side when she needed him.
      • Matt resolved to let go of his old habits of pushing her away when he felt pulled on or stifled. He wanted to feel the same love for her face-to-face as he had during his lovingkindness meditations.
  • A loving and gentle heart: The radiance of our true nature
  • Living in Love
  • Guided Meditation: Cultivating a forgiving Heart
  • Guided Meditation: Awakening Lovingkindness

Chapter 11: Awakening together

  • Even when we are completely alone, we carry within us the sense of whom we belong with and our concerns about how others regard us. Feeling the care of others allows us, like the king, to awaken from trance and become whole.
  • Conscious Relationship: The heart of spiritual practice
    • The key elements are: taking responsibility for causing pain to another, listening deeply to understand the person’s suffering, sincerely apologizing and renewing our resolve to act with compassion toward this person and all beings.
  • Walking the path with spiritual friends
  • Pain is not personal
    • Not taking pain personally is essential to Radical Acceptance. As the Buddha taught, life’s difficulties are not owned or caused by an individual—our changing states of body and mind are influenced by myriad variables.
  • Guided Meditation: Communicating with awareness
    • Set intention -> present, honest, kind
    • Let body be anchor -> breathing, hands, stomach, feet
    • Listen from heart -> attention, awareness, non-judge
    • Speak from heart -> slow, feels true, mindfull. or not respond.
    • Pause, relax, attend
    • Radical Acceptance of the moment.

Chapter 12: Realizing our true Nature

  • When we are trapped in the trance of feeling separate and unworthy, Buddha nature appears to be outside of us.
  • As we spiritually mature, our yearning to see truth and live with an open heart becomes more compelling than our reflex to avoid pain and chase after pleasure.
    • We may feel mistreated and angry at our partner but we are willing to recognize our part, to see their pain, to forgive and keep loving.
    • When we become lonely or sad, we are less inclined to dull the painful feelings with food, drugs or staying busy.
    • We become increasingly aligned with our evolutionary destiny, which is to awaken into our natural wisdom and compassion.
  • Doubting our buddha nature
    • “Who do you think you are?”
  • Seeing beyond the self and letting go into awareness
    • The Buddha taught that holding on to anything, including a sense of being the observer, obscures the full freedom of awareness.
    • “Who is thinking?” We bring mindfulness to awareness itself. We look into awareness. By inquiring and then looking into awareness, we can cut through and dispel the deepest illusions of self that have held us separate and bound.
    • But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience.
    • Our attention is always fixating on something—a flattering comment someone said, our plan for next Saturday, an image of our dirty kitchen, a rerun of an argument. Our reality is the thoughts and dramas we see in our mental movies. We step beyond the net by letting go of our stories and pursuits and turning toward awareness. This is like looking back at the projector and realizing it is actually light that is making the images look alive. We look back into the emptiness that is the creative source of all stories and emotions, into the formless fertile space that gives rise to all of existence. There, we “see the universe as it is.”
    • “Look and see . . . Let go and be free”
    • Rather than trying to control or interpret our experience, we train to relax our grip. By wakefully letting go into what is right here, we are carried home into the mystery and beauty that is our deepest nature.
    • The path of awakening is simply a process of wakeful, profound relaxing.
  • Realizing our nature as both emptiness and love
    • What our mind recognizes as empty awareness, our heart experiences as love.
    • Seeing pure awareness without engaging lovingly with our life is a daydream. Living in this relative world without vision is a nightmare.” We can be tempted, sometimes in pursuit of non-attachment, to distance ourselves from the messy wildness of our bodies and emotions, and from our relationships with each other.
    • There was nothing to do but include in awareness wave after wave of grief.
    • Our grief is the honest recognition that this cherished life is passing.
    • When we are filled with wanting, grief or fear, prematurely looking toward awareness may be a way of disengaging from the rugged rawness of our emotions.
  • The pathway home: stepping into unconditional presence
    • The Tibetan Book of the Dead offers the deepest reassurance: “Remember these teachings, remember the clear light, the shining light of your own nature. No matter where or how far you wander, the light is only a split second, a half a breath, away. It is never too late to recognize the clear light of your pure awareness.”
    • When we get lost we need only pause, look at what is true, relax our heart and arrive again.

  • Guided meditation: Who am I