Radical Acceptance is a meditative practice wherein we acknowledge what we’re experiencing—positive or negative—and welcome it. It’s a powerful tool that allows us to be fully present in each passing moment. It helps us avoid getting stuck in our own heads. Tara Brach, a practicing psychologist and devout Buddhist, discusses how we can use Radical Acceptance to live our lives more fully by always bringing our full attention to the present moment and accepting it for what it is.
In Radical Acceptance we’ll discuss:
Many of us—perhaps even most of us—struggle with feelings of unworthiness. We never feel as if we’re good enough, smart enough, successful enough, or whatever the focus of our insecurity is.
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.
These feelings drive us to all kinds of self-destructive behavior, most notably addiction in all its various forms. Whether it’s to drugs, sex, work—an addiction that is, unfortunately, applauded by Western culture—or something else, addiction is often an attempt to escape the feelings of worthlessness.
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.
The Zen master Seng-tsan said that to be free is to live without worrying about imperfection. Imperfections don’t mean that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not worthy of love or respect—rather, they’re a natural and inescapable part of existence. Therefore, it’s much better to accept yourself, others, and life as they are, rather than chasing some impossible dream of how they should be.
By becoming so focused on ourselves, and chasing what we think we want, we cut ourselves off from the things that fulfill our greatest needs: those things that keep us connected to ourselves and each other.
Our greatest needs are met when we relate to one another, when we are fully present in every moment instead of worrying about the past or future, and when we accept and revel in the beauty—and the pain—that’s always around us.
Decenter yourself. Not everything that happens is a reflection of you or your perceived flaws. Whatever’s going on at any given moment, remember that it’s not about you; it just is what it is. That’s the key to Radical Acceptance.
Breaking out of these unhealthy thoughts and coping mechanisms begins with accepting everything about ourselves, our lives, and our experiences. This means being aware of everything that’s happening inside our minds at bodies at every moment and embracing it. It means not shying away from sorrow or pain. It means recognizing our desires and dislikes without judging ourselves for them or feeling forced to act upon them. (However, Radical Acceptance does not mean accepting harmful behavior, either from ourselves or anyone else.)
Radical Acceptance goes against all of our conditioned reactions. Rather than embracing physical and emotional pain, we tend to resist it. We tense up our muscles and our minds. We start thinking about what could be causing the pain, how long it might last, what we can do to make it go away. Perhaps we blame ourselves for the pain, thinking that it’s a sign of our own shortcomings.
Even when things are going well, we start telling ourselves stories about how we don’t deserve the good fortune, when it might end, or how it’ll lead to more pain in the long run (like eating an ice cream cone while worrying about how many calories are in it).
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.
There are two key aspects of Radical Acceptance: recognition and compassion. The first part, recognition, is what Buddhists often call mindfulness. This is the practice of understanding what is happening to us physically, mentally, and emotionally, without being ruled by it.
For example, if we’re afraid, we might recognize that our minds are racing, our bodies are tense, and we feel compelled to run away. In doing this, we don’t try to change or manage the experience, we simply take it as-is. We can’t accept an experience until we clearly see what we’re accepting.
The second aspect, compassion, is responding with care and tenderness. Rather than judging ourselves harshly for what we feel or think, we honor the experience. However, that doesn’t mean that we indulge all of our desires. Rather, we acknowledge them and look upon them with tenderness and care.
Instead of berating ourselves for wanting a candy bar, for instance, we simply accept that at this point in time we feel the desire for a candy bar. That doesn’t mean we have to have one—though we could—we simply understand and accept our desire for what it is.
Both aspects are needed for Radical Acceptance. Either one on its own will create an unbalanced and harmful mindset.
Recognition without compassion may leave us aware of what we’re experiencing, but without the tools to cope with it. We could end up digging ourselves deeper into those feelings by dwelling on them or judging and blaming ourselves for getting into whatever situation caused them.
Compassion without recognition causes a different kind of problem: Instead of trapping ourselves in self-reproach, we trap ourselves in self-pity. We create narratives wherein we tried our best but still couldn’t get what we wanted or needed. This is the trap of accepting experiences without truly understanding them.
Feeling unworthy puts us into a sort of trance. We can’t see past our own perceived shortcomings; our self-image becomes twisted and ugly, and we feel unkind both toward ourselves and others. We start behaving like tigers freed from long captivity—we pace the same tiny corners of our minds over and over, and never realize that the cage is an illusion.
Radical Acceptance is how we awaken from that trance. Recognition of, and compassion for, our own moment-to-moment experiences help us to recognize when we’re caught in harmful patterns. We must recognize when we’re stuck in habits of fighting (others or ourselves), judging (again, others or ourselves), and trying to control our pleasures and pains.
With that understanding, we can start to see other ways forward. If we stop being so afraid of unpleasant experiences and demanding people, and learn to forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, we can start taking down the defenses that block out so much of the world. Rather than trying to control life, we can simply live it.
Buddhists call this clear comprehension: seeing things as they are. That includes patterns that emerge in our lives, and broader consequences of our thoughts and actions.
The times we need Radical Acceptance the most may be when it seems impossible to practice—when we’re angry, or afraid, or hurting. These are the times when we must be the kindest to ourselves.
We can begin by asking ourselves simple, friendly questions. 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. The following anecdote shows a powerful example of this practice.
There was a clinical psychologist and practicing Buddhist, whom we’ll call Jacob. Jacob was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease when he went to give a talk on Buddhism to an audience of over 100 people. He got up on stage and suddenly realized that he had no idea where he was or why. Jacob began to panic.
Rather than being ruled by his feelings, Jacob practiced a mindfulness technique—he turned his attention inward and asked himself what he was experiencing. Then he started naming his experiences aloud: fear, embarrassment, confusion, and so on. As the exercise took effect and he started calming down, he shared that experience too. Finally, after several minutes, he returned his attention to his audience.
Many of the people there were deeply moved. Jacob’s meditation had been both a practical lesson about mindfulness and a powerful insight into Alzheimer’s Disease.
The exercise worked because Jacob embraced his experience with open curiosity and acceptance. He didn’t try to fight against his fear and confusion, because they weren’t something to be fought—they were simply his reality at that moment. Jacob didn’t create an enemy where there wasn’t one.
A common story of the Buddha has a similar lesson. Mara, the god of deception, appeared frequently throughout the Buddha’s life to attack him or try to sway him from his enlightenment. Each time Mara came, the Buddha acknowledged his presence with a simple, “I see you, Mara.”
Rather than trying to block Mara out or drive him away, the Buddha would invite him in for tea. They would talk for a while, and eventually Mara would realize that his illusions and lies were powerless against the Buddha’s acceptance and kindness. Each time, Mara eventually left on his own, leaving the Buddha completely unharmed.
All of us will have our own visits from “Mara” throughout our lives. These visits may come in the form of difficult emotions like anger and fear, or in the form of the stories we tell ourselves. Every time we tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, doomed to unhappiness, an embarrassment, or whatever judgments we pass on ourselves, that could be seen as a visit from Mara.
Like the Buddha, and like Jacob, we can meet these experiences with unconditional friendliness. Sometimes we’ll catch ourselves lashing out at those around us, or stewing in frustration over every little problem. That’s a chance to name our experiences like Jacob did, and invite them in for tea like the Buddha did.
By naming our hardships, we rob them of some of their power. Approach this with a spirit of friendly questioning; you’re not seeking to judge, only to understand. For example, you might ask yourself if you’re really so angry because there’s a fly in your office, or if you’re stressed about your work and worried that you’re falling behind. Finding and recognizing what we’re actually experiencing is how we say, “I see you, Mara.”
Once we understand what’s happening to us, the next step is to welcome it. In the spirit of Radical Acceptance, we can say “yes” to our experiences, no matter what they may be. Say “yes” to the frustration, to the sadness, to the desire. Love yourself and all of your experiences. In other words, greet Mara as an old friend and invite him in for tea. By welcoming our experiences in this way, we allow them to rise up and fade away without gaining power over us.
Desire and fear are two of the most powerful forces in our lives. Desire attracts us to things, and fear drives us away from them. If we don’t encounter them with mindfulness and acceptance, we may find that the push and pull of those two emotions drive our every thought and action.
There’s a common misconception that Buddhism is anti-pleasure and anti-desire. People can come away with the impression that they’re not supposed to want things, or to pursue those wants. In fact, Buddha’s teachings were never about eliminating or ignoring desire. As with all of our experiences, Buddha merely urges us not to be ruled by it.
When we encounter desire in any form—whether it’s desire for food, companionship, a new gadget, or anything else—we should meet it without resistance and without letting it possess us. We should meet desire with mindfulness; in other words, with Radical Acceptance. In doing so, we’ll find that we can experience desire but live freely in spite of it.
The writer D.H. Lawrence once said that people who just do whatever they want at the moment aren’t free. On a superficial level it might feel like freedom, but their every action is being commanded by their desires. The Buddha’s teachings about desire are really about avoiding that false freedom.
Fear, like desire, is a natural and necessary force. Fear warns us of danger and prepares us—physically and mentally—to run, fight, or hide from it. In its purest form, fear is a desire for life and an aversion to death.
However, fear often goes beyond what’s needed to keep us alive. We may find ourselves tense and on guard, even when there’s no threat to our safety. Our minds may be working constantly, trying to figure out what will go wrong next. When this is the case, we’re in a state of defending our lives rather than living them.
Furthermore, the effect isn’t just physical. Fear also creates rigid, habitual thought patterns. The intense focus that helps us respond to real threats becomes obsession. Our minds, which are hardwired to look for patterns, tell us endless stories about what could go wrong and how we might avoid it.
Many mainstream religions, from Judaism and Christianity to Buddhism and Confucianism, teach that desire causes suffering. While that can be true, the lesson is often delivered with a lack of nuance that only makes matters worse. We come to believe that all desire is sinful, and that feeling it is a sign that we’re flawed and selfish. We berate ourselves for experiencing natural urges, and we fear the intensity of our own passions.
However, desire isn’t sinful or wrong, it’s natural. Moreover, we can learn to face desire without blaming ourselves for it or letting it control us.
When we find ourselves gripped by desire, we should begin by taking a pause. Don’t immediately chase after what you want; instead, recognize what’s happening to you and take a step back to observe your experience.
A key realization that comes from such mindfulness is that those desires and experiences aren’t our fault. We don’t create them, and we’re not to blame for them; they simply exist. It’s up to us to accept them for what they are.
This realization frees us from the fear and shame that come with unmet desires. We come to understand that experiencing desire doesn’t mean we’re flawed or sinful people—we’re simply people who have natural experiences.
Like desire, we often make fear personal when it really isn’t. We think that we’re afraid because of some flaw or mistake that we’ve made, and we blame ourselves for it. This may be a carryover from childhood: Children often make sense of hurtful or frightening situations by blaming themselves, because the thought of their caregivers or the world being cruel and painful seems impossible.
In short, we aren’t just afraid; we’re afraid that we’re going to be punished for something we did wrong. We think we’ve made a mistake and somehow left ourselves vulnerable.
Worry and anxiety can prevent us from existing fully in the moment. When we’re constantly withdrawn and tense, when our minds are hyperaware of our surroundings and telling us that these feelings are our own fault, we can’t accept and live our experiences.
As with desire, we can awaken from the trance by taking a pause and practicing Radical Acceptance. When we examine our fear and welcome it in, we’ll come to understand that it’s not something we created—it’s not our fault. Like any other experience, we can allow the fear to rise up and fade away without affecting us. That allows us to tackle the source of the fear—the problem—with clarity and understanding.
The word compassion means “to feel with.” Compassion is when we respond to pain—our own or someone else’s—with tenderness and love. It goes directly against our societal conditioning, which tells us to run from pain. However, compassion allows us to embrace our experiences instead of constantly fighting against them. Far from avoiding pain, we have to intentionally focus on it in order to cultivate compassion.
Meeting our pain with compassion and Radical Acceptance is doubly hard because, like with desire and fear, we often blame ourselves for our pain. We might tell ourselves that we haven’t been taking proper care of ourselves, or that we made a stupid mistake that led to our current pain.
Instead, we can meet that suffering with compassion. We can say to ourselves, “I care about this pain. May this pain kindle compassion.” It’ll probably feel strange at first, or even embarrassing—we aren’t used to offering ourselves compassion in this way. However, by continuing to practice compassion for our own pain, we can start to let go of our own pains and the insecurities that come with them.
Radical Acceptance can help to strip away the blame and shame we put upon ourselves. When we’re blocking out painful experiences, compassion helps to bring down the walls. In many cases, compassion is necessary for emotional and spiritual healing.
When we have awareness and compassion in our relationships—in other words, when we approach them with Radical Acceptance—they can be powerful tools for spiritual growth and healing.
Note that ”relationships” here doesn’t just mean romantic relationships. We have relationships with everyone we interact with: family, friends, teachers, colleagues, and so on.
We’ve discussed how Radical Acceptance tells us that our suffering isn’t wrong, and pain doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with us. We can get that same message from others, and give it back to them.
Giving Radical Acceptance to others reminds them that they are inherently good, and worthy of love. When we practice Radical Acceptance of others, and they practice Radical Acceptance of us, we can find wells of confidence and strength we never knew that we had.
For an example of what this strength can do, Radical Acceptance is the key to interventions for alcoholics or drug addicts. An intervention isn’t about confronting or attacking the addict. Instead, the key is to let the addict see and hear the people who love him in spite of the harm he’d caused to himself and others.
In short, relationships have power that individuals lack.
Each of us has an essential goodness at the core of our beings—what the Dalai Lama calls “Buddha nature.” We are, at heart, beings of awareness and love. However, it’s often hard to see that essential goodness in ourselves or in others. Rediscovering it is one major goal of Radical Acceptance.
When we feel betrayed (like by a cheating spouse, for example) we often lash out in anger. We attack the one who hurt us, and initially put the blame on him or her. However, many of our negative experiences also put us into the trance of unworthiness—we come to think that we’re having problems because there’s something wrong with us. Our outward resentment of that other person then reflects our inner resentment of ourselves—the betrayal confirms our feelings that we’re unworthy of love.
Recognizing the difference between doing bad things and being a bad person is a difficult task. It requires looking past harmful behaviors to see each person’s vulnerability and pain, and the Buddha nature beneath all of that. It requires Radical Acceptance.
Other people have Buddha nature at the core of their beings, just like we do. If we concentrate on seeing past everything extraneous like people’s appearance, actions, and our own labels for them, we start to see that we’re all essentially the same: beings made of love and awareness.
There are various techniques that can help us see this basic goodness in others:
One practice is to imagine other people as children. No matter how frustrated parents may get with their children, many of them will feel simple, powerful love during quiet times; times when the child isn’t asking for yet another cookie, or bothering the parent during an important meeting. As with children, we don’t necessarily dislike people just because we’re frustrated with their behavior.
Another method is to imagine that you’re meeting someone for the first time. Let go of your history with that person and your habitual labels for him or her. Simply encounter people as they are in that moment, not as you imagine them based on past interactions.
Finally, imagine that you’re seeing someone for the last time. What do you admire about that person? What would you want to remember if you knew you’d never see him or her again?
Seeing the essential goodness in people naturally awakens what Buddhists call metta, translated as “lovingkindness.” Simply put, metta is a wish for someone’s health and happiness.
This practice of universal lovingkindness is based on the understanding that every person’s deepest wish is simply to be loved. According to the Buddha, lovingkindness is the single most important spiritual practice. Wishing for universal peace and happiness helps us to reconnect with the essential goodness that exists in all people, and it all begins with Radical Acceptance.
Radical Acceptance is a meditative practice that acknowledges what we’re experiencing—positive or negative—and welcomes it. It’s a powerful tool that allows us to be fully present in each passing moment. It helps us avoid getting stuck in our own heads. Tara Brach, a practicing psychologist and devout Buddhist, discusses how we can use Radical Acceptance to live our lives more fully, by always bringing our full attention to the present moment and accepting it for what it is.
In Radical Acceptance we’ll discuss:
Many people—perhaps even most people—struggle with feelings of unworthiness. They never feel as if they’re good enough, or smart enough, or successful enough, or whatever the focus of their insecurity is. In their attempts to become “better,” people constantly observe and judge themselves. They are always on the lookout for imperfections in themselves and, when they inevitably find some, it just drives them deeper into their sense of inadequacy.
These feelings drive people to all kinds of self-destructive behavior, most notably addiction in all its various forms. Whether the addiction is to drugs, sex, work—an addiction that is, unfortunately, applauded by Western culture—or something else, it often stems from an attempt to escape the feelings of worthlessness.
They also create feelings of isolation. People who don’t think that they’re good enough will assume that others think the same. They’ll find it hard to trust people who offer them love, friendship, or even simple encouragement.
The tragic irony is that people are always trying to go somewhere else, do something else, be someone else; but we all reach the same inescapable end. Where do we think we’re going?
To illustrate how we come to have these unworthy feelings, Brach shares an anecdote about her time at an ashram—a small religious and spiritual community. She struggled with feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, and hoped that she could alleviate them through spiritual growth.
It worked to some extent. After a lengthy session of meditation and yoga, she would feel whole and at peace. However, as the day went on, feelings of self-doubt and judgement would creep in. She wanted others to admire her spirituality, and felt guilty for having those desires. At the same time, she judged some other members of her ashram for what she saw as their deficient spirituality, and felt guilty for those thoughts.
She eventually came to realize that, at the most basic level, she was still trying to do the same thing as always: She was trying to find peace and self-acceptance by changing or improving herself. That was why, no matter how deeply she meditated or how proficient she became at yoga, those feelings were doomed to always come back.
Consider the foundational myth of much of Western culture: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Most of us have heard it so many times that it’s become banal, but take a moment to really think about the message of it. The story of Eden teaches us humans are inherently bad, and we need to cleanse ourselves of sin before we’re worthy of happiness. Moreover, the way we cleanse ourselves is supposed to be through strict control: Control of our thoughts, our emotions, our natural urges, other people, and even the world around us.
Western culture breeds and nourishes unhealthy, self-loathing thoughts. From childhood we’re constantly set in competition against each other, forced to prove endlessly that we’re smart enough, skilled enough, “cool” enough to be worthy of attention and praise. Every human connection—with family, friends, or teachers—has to be earned, and there’s always someone watching to see if we’re living up to expectations.
There’s a short anecdote about a family in a restaurant: a mother and father, and their five-year-old daughter. When the waitress comes to take orders, the daughter asks for a hot dog. The father immediately interrupts and says that she’ll have the meatloaf instead. The waitress, completely ignoring the interruption, asks the girl what she’d like on her hot dog. The parents are stunned, but the girl comments with amazement, “She thinks I’m real.”
This story gets to the heart of a lot of the insecurities people grow up with. Many of them stem from a culture that treats children as if they’re not real people, with their own thoughts and feelings. Instead, imperfect parents—carrying on lessons from their own imperfect parents—see their children through the lenses of their own desires and fears. What if the child doesn’t get into a good college? What if she acts out and reflects badly on her parents? They try to drive the child’s life the way they wish they’d driven their own lives, never thinking to ask the child what he or she wants.
In abusive homes this is taken to the extreme, where children are told that they’re in the way, that they’re annoying, that they’re worthless drains on the parents’ time and energy. However, even in healthier situations, children are often taught to be quiet and obedient, and to parrot what their parents think or want to hear.
In short, Western families—often unintentionally—continue the story of the Garden of Eden. Each new generation is brought up thinking that they’re inherently, fundamentally flawed, and that they have to fix those flaws in order to get back into the Garden.
Naturally, people seek out ways to cope with or cover up the feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy, like Adam and Eve trying to hide their nakedness from God. Over time, each of us comes up with our own personal mix of coping mechanisms to hide our imperfections and make up for what we believe to be wrong with us. Here are a few examples.
Most of these coping mechanisms are rooted in the assumption that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. Every time we recognize and hide from our own sense of inadequacy, we’re strengthening the neural pathways that cause that feeling in the first place. Even the last one, which assumes that there’s something wrong with others instead of ourselves, perpetuates the harmful pattern. In short, by trying to avoid the pain, we’re only making it worse.
Legend has it that the Buddha attained enlightenment while meditating under the Bodhi tree. While he would go on to teach many lessons about spirituality and religion, his teachings all begin with what is called the first noble truth: Suffering is universal, and understanding it is the first step toward enlightenment.
During his meditation, the Buddha examined his own suffering and discovered that it came from the false belief that he was a distinct person, separate and apart from the universe. This sense of “selfness” had him trapped in endless cycles of desire and aversion. He—like all people—was fruitlessly chasing what he thought he wanted, and running from what he perceived as painful or unwelcome.
This sense of individuality goes back to the very earliest forms of life: single-celled organisms whose membranes created barriers between them and the rest of the world. This was the beginning of dualism, the belief that your own self is separate from the world around you. Desires and aversions are also part of evolution, millions of years’ worth of history guiding us toward what will help us and away from what will hurt us.
However, when those wants and fears become the core of how we see ourselves, we lose our larger identities. When we perceive our experiences through a lens of “I” and “mine,” the universal suffering becomes personal; the sense that “something is wrong” becomes “something is wrong with me.”
It may help to understand what the self truly is: It’s nothing but a collection of our most habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Consciousness is the mind telling itself a story about what it’s experiencing. Isolating yourself, believing that you are somehow different and distinct from what’s around you, separates you from the world and leaves you insecure, needy, and afraid. It disconnects you from the love that unites all living things, your deepest, truest self—what the Dalai Lama calls your “Buddha nature.”
The Buddha taught a lesson that’s in sharp contrast with Western ideas of sin: Being born human is a precious gift. It’s a chance to recognize the love and awareness that is the true nature of every creature. Or, as the Dalai Lama once said, “We all have Buddha nature.” In other words, people are inherently good, not bad. We don’t need to constantly strive to prove and improve ourselves.
We are good enough.
The Zen master Seng-tsan said that to be free is to live without worrying about imperfection. Imperfections—in yourself or in the world—don’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. They’re a natural and inescapable part of existence. Therefore, it’s much better to accept yourself, others, and life as they are, rather than chasing some impossible dream of how they should be.
By becoming so focused on ourselves, and chasing what we think we want, we cut ourselves off from the things that fulfill our greatest needs: Those things that keep us connected and reaffirm our natural goodness, our Buddha nature. Our greatest needs are met when we relate to each other, when we are fully present in every moment instead of worrying about the past or future, and when we accept and revel in the beauty—and the pain—that’s always around us.
Decenter yourself. Remember that it’s not all about you; it just is. This is the key to Radical Acceptance.
Recognizing habitual thought patterns and worries is the first step toward accepting yourself. As you do this, make sure not to judge yourself or your responses to these questions; just accept them for what they currently are.
Is there something about your body that you don’t accept? This could mean something about your appearance, your fitness, or your general health, such as blaming yourself when you get sick. What is it, if anything?
Is there something about your mind that you don’t accept? For example, do you tend to tell yourself that you’re not smart enough, or that you’re boring, or do you scold yourself for having mean-spirited or inappropriate thoughts about others? What about your mind don’t you accept, if anything?
Is there something about your moods and emotions that you don’t accept? Are you afraid of your negative feelings, or critical of yourself for being impatient or irritable? What about your feelings don’t you accept, if anything?
Many of us may be trapping ourselves without even realizing it. The following anecdote gives a literal example of this principle.
There was a tiger named Mohini who lived at the Washington, D.C. National Zoo. She spent most of her life pacing around her 12x12 cage. Finally, biologists and zoo staff worked together to create what they thought would be an ideal enclosure: an area that covered several acres, complete with hills, a pond, and lots of different plants. They thought she’d be happy there.
However, when they moved her to the new enclosure, she immediately went to one small corner of it and spent the rest of her life there, pacing around an area the size of her old cage. Mohini was trapped in her old patterns, unable to understand the freedom that she now had.
It’s a deeply sad story, but one with a lesson that many of us can benefit from. Like Mohini, many of us spend our lives trapped in the same fearful, judgmental patterns, never realizing that we can be so much freer and happier than we think.
The way out of this self-imposed prison starts with accepting everything about ourselves, our lives, and our experiences. This means being aware of everything that’s happening inside our minds at bodies at every moment, and embracing it. It means not shying away from sorrow or pain. It means recognizing our desires and dislikes without judging ourselves for them, or feeling forced to act upon them. (However, Radical Acceptance does not mean accepting harmful behavior, either from ourselves or anyone else.)
Radical Acceptance goes against all of our conditioned reactions. Rather than embracing physical and emotional pain, we tend to resist it. We tense up our muscles and our minds. We start thinking about what could be causing the pain, how long it might last, what we can do to make it go away. Perhaps we blame ourselves for the pain, thinking that it’s a sign of our own shortcomings.
Even when things are going well, we start telling ourselves stories about how we don’t deserve the good fortune, when it might end, or how it’ll lead to more pain in the long run (like eating an ice cream cone while worrying about how many calories are in it).
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.
There are two key aspects of Radical Acceptance: recognition and compassion. The first part, recognition, is what Buddhists often call mindfulness. This is the practice of understanding what is happening to us physically, mentally, and emotionally, without being ruled by it.
For example, if we’re afraid, we might recognize that our minds are racing, our bodies are tense, and we feel compelled to run away. In doing this, we don’t try to change or manage the experience, we simply take it as-is. We can’t accept an experience until we clearly see what we’re accepting.
The second aspect, compassion, is responding with care and tenderness. Rather than judging ourselves harshly for what we feel or think, we honor the experience. However, that doesn’t mean that we indulge all of our desires. Rather, we acknowledge them and look upon them with tenderness and care.
Instead of berating ourselves for wanting a candy bar, for instance, we simply accept that at this point in time we feel the desire for a candy bar. That doesn’t mean we have to have one—though we could—we simply understand and accept our desire for what it is.
Both aspects are needed for Radical Acceptance. Either one on its own will create an unbalanced and harmful mindset.
Recognition without compassion may leave us aware of what we’re experiencing, but without the tools to cope with it. We could end up digging ourselves deeper into those feelings by dwelling on them, or judging and blaming ourselves for getting into whatever situation caused them.
Compassion without recognition causes a different kind of problem: Instead of trapping ourselves in self-reproach, we trap ourselves in self-pity. We create narratives wherein we tried our best but still couldn’t get what we wanted or needed. This is the trap of accepting experiences without truly understanding them.
Feeling unworthy puts us into a sort of trance. We can’t see past our own perceived shortcomings; our self-image becomes twisted and ugly, and we feel unkind both toward ourselves and others. We become like the tiger Mohini, spending our lives pacing one tiny corner of a large, beautiful enclosure.
Radical Acceptance is how we awaken from the trance. Recognition of, and compassion for, our own moment-to-moment experiences help us to recognize when we’re caught in harmful patterns. We must recognize when we’re stuck in habits of fighting (others or ourselves), judging (again, others or ourselves), and trying to control our pleasures and pains.
With that understanding, we can start to see other ways forward. If we stop being so afraid of unpleasant experiences and demanding people, and learn to forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, we can start taking down the defenses that block out so much of the world. Rather than trying to control life, we can simply live it.
Buddhists call this clear comprehension: seeing things as they are, including the patterns of our lives and the broader consequences of our thoughts and actions. If Mohini had the capacity for clear comprehension, she’d have realized that she had acres of land to roam.
It may seem impossible to embrace Radical Acceptance when we need it most, when we are in our deepest trances of unworthiness. However, you must remember the Buddha nature that lives in all of us. It’s the core of our essence, eternal and unchangeable. The nature of the mind is recognition; the nature of the heart is compassion. The aspects of Radical Acceptance are always with us, no matter how lost we may feel.
In fact, it’s often only when we hit our lowest points that we truly open up to Radical Acceptance. Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step program says that “rock bottom” is the turning point where one can start to recover from addiction. That’s because rock bottom is when the addict realizes that his or her current lifestyle isn’t working. It often takes some terrible shock for people to realize that they have to make a change, and it’s the same with embracing Radical Acceptance.
Brach shares a deeply personal story about the moment when she first began to truly understand Radical Acceptance. She was living in her ashram with her husband and she became pregnant. At first they were overjoyed, but she suffered a miscarriage and lost the baby. Then, when she needed support the most, her teacher publicly shamed her. He said that the miscarriage had been her own fault; that she was too focused on her professional life outside of the ashram, and the stress had killed her baby.
It was only as Brach grappled with the emotional trauma of those two devastating blows—the loss of her child and being rejected by her teacher—that she started to accept herself as she was. Rather than fighting the pain, she began to embrace it, to allow it to wash over her without changing her.
She realized that she wanted to love herself, even if she were as flawed as her teacher claimed. She didn’t want to be constantly watching and judging herself, fighting against the voice that said there was something wrong with her. She realized that she was a being of understanding and compassion, and no aspect of her—including those aspects that were “flawed” or not what she thought they should be—could affect that deepest self.
While the specifics of Brach’s situation were extraordinary, the theme is a common one: We often find that we have to be truly, deeply injured before we can begin to heal.
Radical Acceptance is so much the opposite of how we’re trained to think about ourselves that people can get confused about what it actually is. If your Radical Acceptance leads you to “accept” and continue harmful practices and habits, you’re not practicing it correctly. Let’s examine a few common misconceptions:
Radical Acceptance isn’t about giving up. Some people come away with the idea that accepting yourself as you are means giving up on personal growth. However, Radical Acceptance isn’t an excuse to say “this is who I am, and that’ll never change.” Instead, it’s an opportunity to recognize who you are currently, and who you’d really like to be—rather than who society says you should be. In short, it’s impossible to change yourself without first knowing yourself.
Radical Acceptance isn’t about limitations. Some people think that Radical Acceptance means accepting that there are things they can’t do, or aren’t suited for. For instance, someone who’s been in a string of failed relationships might look at himself and conclude that he’s not suited for intimacy. However, that’s not what Radical Acceptance is. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: He’s giving power to the fearful voice in his head that says he’s not good enough.
Radical Acceptance means looking honestly at your failures and successes alike, and accepting that you don’t know what the future holds. It means putting your full effort into everything you do, and learning and growing from every experience.
Radical Acceptance isn’t about self-indulgence. Accepting that you have a desire and acting upon it are two different things. For example, a habitual smoker would recognize not only that she has a craving for a cigarette, but the reasons behind that craving. She would recognize the physical and emotional tension that comes with it. She would read the warning label and accept that smoking is a harmful and dangerous habit.
If she does decide to smoke, she wouldn’t try to justify her decision or struggle against her guilt; she’d accept the feelings just as she accepted the craving that led to her decision. Hopefully, in time, recognizing the truths behind her actions will lead her to better decisions.
Radical Acceptance isn’t about being passive. Many people think that accepting something means you no longer work to change it. For example, they say that accepting something like racism, or global warming, means allowing it to progress unchecked.
However, Radical Acceptance is about what’s happening internally, not externally. It begins with examining our own outrage, fear, guilt, or whatever we’re feeling about those injustices. Before we act or react to what’s happening, we have to understand and accept how it’s affecting us in that moment. With that kind of self-awareness we’re able to act wisely and effectively, rather than blindly and desperately.
Radical Acceptance isn’t about accepting a “self.” This misunderstanding is specific to Buddhism, which teaches that there’s no such thing as a true self—what might be called a soul. Many students of Buddhism point out that accepting yourself as you are seems to imply the existence of such a “self,” which is incompatible with Buddha’s teachings.
However, Radical Acceptance is really about the mental and physical sensations you’re currently experiencing. It’s accepting yourself as you are in the moment. By doing so, you’ll recognize that those experiences are temporary and impersonal, not some core part of who you are. This will help free you from the illusion that you’re a limited being, defined by your experiences.
The previous chapters introduced Radical Acceptance and explained why we all need it. In chapters 3-5 we’ll begin exploring techniques to bring Radical Acceptance into our lives.
Radical Acceptance requires that we be fully present, aware of what’s happening to us and within us. In order to do that we have to pause—momentarily stop our efforts to control the world and ourselves. In this chapter we discuss the importance of taking a moment to observe your experiences before responding to them.
Oftentimes, we simply react to problems as they arise. However, when we just react, we’re often responding from a place of negative emotion such as fear, anger, or frustration. Stopping for just a few seconds to observe and identify your current experience can help you respond to it with wisdom and clarity.
For example, if we’re about to eat a piece of chocolate, we should first take a moment to recognize the anticipation we feel, and perhaps the underlying guilt or judgment. We might then decide to eat it anyway—fully present and able to enjoy the experience—or we might put it back and go for a jog instead. The point of a pause is that we don’t know what will happen next; it leaves us open to the entire world of possibility.
Tom Wolfe, in his book The Right Stuff, describes an experiment the U.S. Air Force ran in the 1950s, sending pilots to fly higher than any pilot ever had before. They found that, once they broke free of the denser part of the atmosphere, they totally lost control of their planes. The harder they tried to correct their path, the more wildly they spun out of control. Several pilots tragically died.
They only found the solution by accident, when a pilot named Chuck Yeager was knocked out by the violent spinning. He came to after his plane had reentered the denser air, where normal flying techniques would work correctly. As it turned out, the only way out of that desperate situation was doing nothing. In other words, pausing—letting events play out until he could take control again.
Probably—hopefully—very few of us will ever find ourselves in an out-of-control fighter jet. However, many of us will find ourselves in situations where we feel similarly helpless, and yet desperate to regain control. Perhaps we’ve made a mistake at work, and are scrambling to hide it or make up for it. Maybe we’re angry because someone hurt us, or someone we care about. These are the times when taking the pause is both hardest and most necessary.
There’s an old folk story about a man who was so afraid of his own shadow that he tried to run away from it. However, no matter how far or how fast he ran, he could never put even the smallest distance between himself and his shadow. Eventually the man ran himself to death—but if he’d just taken a moment to sit in the shade and rest, his shadow would have disappeared.
Each of us has our own shadow. It’s those parts of us that we don’t accept, and that we try to hide from others. It’s born from the conflict between who we are inside and who our society and culture tells us we’re supposed to be.
Your shadow is created from the thoughts and feelings that you repress in order to avoid rejection from others (or yourself), and rooted in the underlying feeling that you’re somehow defective. For example, if you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be angry about something, you’re not just telling yourself that it’s wrong to be angry—you’re telling yourself that there’s something wrong with you because you’re angry.
Like the man trying to run from his physical shadow, many of us spend our lives running from our emotional shadows. We protect our vulnerabilities by falling into old defensive patterns—lashing out, running away, or hiding from the pain. Every time we react instinctively, instead of pausing and then facing our shadows with Radical Acceptance, we only make the shadow stronger.
As the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung once said, the parts of our psyche that we don’t face are the ultimate source of neurosis and suffering. In order to escape the shadow, we have to face it. We must accept that what we’re hiding from may be painful or frightening, but that it’ll never fix itself until we stop running.
The traditional story of the Buddha’s enlightenment involves both the sacred pause and the shadow.
Siddhartha Gautama was the son of a king. The king’s advisors said that he would either become a holy man or a great king in his own right. Siddhartha’s father was determined that his son should be a king like he was, so he hid all the pain and suffering of the world from Siddhartha. However, when he was nearly 30, Siddhartha saw signs of age, disease, and death. He wondered how people could find happiness in such a harsh world, and set out to find the answer.
At first he looked for wisdom among the ascetics, people who starve and torture their bodies in the attempt to move beyond physical needs. After several years with them Siddhartha was gaunt and sick, but no closer to enlightenment. He left the ascetics to seek another way.
As he lay beside a river, sick and delirious, he remembered a very old memory. He’d been a child watching farmers at work, and he suddenly became aware of both the suffering and the beauty in the world.
The farmers sweated and groaned, the oxen strained to pull their plows, and countless insects were crushed and killed by the tilling. However, at the same time, the sky was beautifully blue, and filled with birds who flew through it effortlessly, joyfully. The air was rich and full of the scent of apple blossoms. Recognizing that there was room in the world for both suffering and joy, Siddhartha felt at peace.
As he came back to himself by the river, Siddhartha realized that he’d experienced that moment when he’d taken a moment to simply sit and watch, rather than chasing after pleasure or pushing away pain. He thought, then, that such a state of awareness and peace must be possible through calm contemplation.
After bathing, eating, and resting, Siddhartha found solitude under a pipal tree—now called the bodhi tree—and began to meditate. In his meditations, he confronted the embodiment of the human shadow, in the form of the god Mara (the Sanskrit word for delusion).
Mara tried to sway him with seduction, threats, and promises. However, Siddhartha met each challenge with Radical Acceptance; he neither pursued nor pushed away what Mara offered. Because Siddhartha refused to be ruled by the delusions, they had no power to harm him. Finally, the earth itself bore witness to Siddhartha’s right to be the Buddha, and Mara fled.
Siddhartha Gautama was a man who took the time to pause and confront his shadow. In doing so, he reached enlightenment and became the Buddha.
Learning Radical Acceptance means pausing over and over again. It means holding our tongue instead of lashing out in anger, or sitting with our anxiety instead of racing to find a distraction. Rather than trying to think or do, we simply experience what’s happening to us physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Pausing might seem awkward or unfamiliar, but there are already many moments where we take the time to do so. In the shower, perhaps, or while driving to work, we often find that we’re not worried about anything in particular—our minds are free to wander. A pause might be the sigh of relief when you figure out a difficult problem, or the moment when you lie down in bed and let go of the day’s stress.
The philosopher Ajahn Buddhadasa calls these short pauses “temporary nirvana.” We briefly experience true peace and freedom when we stop chasing or resisting experiences. He writes that those pauses are necessary; without them we’d either die or go mad.
The famous pianist Arthur Rubenstein was quoted as saying that he didn’t handle the notes better than anyone else—his art lived in the pauses. Like in music, the silence of a pause creates a background that brings the foreground into sharp relief. It makes what comes after it more deliberate and more meaningful.
In short, the pause is the moment when we can see all of the branching paths forward. For example, if someone has insulted us, in that pause we can see the various ways we could respond. What would the result be if we fought back; would the person back down, or would it simply escalate? What if we simply let it go; would things go back to normal, or would the person take it as permission to continue? There may not be a single correct answer, but in the pause we can see our options and try to choose wisely.
While you’re pursuing some goal-oriented activity like working, cleaning, or eating, try taking a moment to pause. Stop what you’re doing, close your eyes, and take a few deep, slow breaths. Try to be aware of what you’re experiencing without any thoughts of what you’re going to do about it.
What physical sensations are you aware of during this pause? Are you tense, nervous, or restless?
What thoughts are you experiencing? Are you still thinking about your task, is there something else occupying your thoughts, or is your mind truly still?
What emotions are you experiencing? Do you feel like you’re being pulled back to your task? What’s it like to simply sit with your experience, rather than trying to do something about it?
In these two chapters we’ll look at specific challenges we all face in life, and how we can apply Radical Acceptance to overcome them.
We begin Chapter 4 with another story of the Buddha and the god Mara, which illustrates how we can practice Radical Acceptance as a friendly conversation with ourselves.
In Chapter 5, we recognize that every mental and emotional experience has a physical impact—and, therefore, what’s happening inside our bodies is an excellent place to begin our friendly questioning. We also discuss how trauma can cut us off from those physical sensations, and possible ways to reconnect with ourselves.
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.
There was a clinical psychologist and practicing Buddhist, whom we’ll call Jacob. Jacob was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease when he went to give a talk on Buddhism to an audience of over 100 people. He got up on stage and suddenly realized that he had no idea where he was or why. Jacob began to panic.
Rather than being ruled by his feelings, Jacob practiced a mindfulness technique. He turned his attention inward, and began naming his experiences aloud: fear, embarrassment, confusion, and so on. As the exercise took effect and he started calming down, he shared that experience too. Finally, after several minutes, he returned his attention to his audience.
Many of the people there were deeply moved. Jacob’s meditation had been both a practical lesson about mindfulness and a powerful insight into Alzheimer’s Disease.
The exercise worked because Jacob embraced his experience with open curiosity and acceptance. He didn’t try to fight against his fear and confusion, because they weren’t something to be fought; they were simply his reality at that moment. Jacob didn’t create an enemy where there wasn’t one.
Another story of the Buddha has a similar lesson. The god Mara didn’t give up after their fateful encounter at the bodhi tree. He returned multiple times throughout the Buddha’s life to attack him or try to sway him from his enlightenment.
Each time Mara appeared, the Buddha acknowledged his presence with a simple, “I see you, Mara.” Rather than trying to block Mara out or drive him away, the Buddha would invite him in for tea. Eventually Mara would leave on his own, powerless as always against the Buddha’s acceptance and kindness.
All of us will have our own visits from Mara throughout our lives. These visits may come in the form of difficult emotions like anger and fear, or in the form of the stories we tell ourselves. Every time we tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, doomed to unhappiness, an embarrassment, or whatever judgments we pass on ourselves, that could be seen as a visit from Mara.
Like the Buddha, and like Jacob, we can meet these experiences with unconditional friendliness. Sometimes we’ll catch ourselves lashing out at those around us, or stewing in frustration over every little problem. That’s a chance to name our experiences like Jacob did, and invite them in for tea like the Buddha did.
By naming our hardships, we rob them of some of their power. Approach this with a spirit of friendly questioning; you’re not seeking to judge, only to understand. For example, you might ask yourself if you’re really so angry because there’s a fly in your office, or if you’re stressed about your work and worried that you’re falling behind. Finding and recognizing what we’re actually experiencing is how we say, “I see you, Mara.”
Once we understand what’s happening to us, the next step is to welcome it. In the spirit of Radical Acceptance, we can say “yes” to our experiences, no matter what they may be. Say “yes” to the frustration, to the sadness, to the desire. Love yourself and all of your experiences. In other words, greet Mara as an old friend and invite him in for tea. By welcoming the experiences in this way, we allow them to pass through us without gaining power over us.
While Radical Acceptance begins with saying yes to our moment-to-moment experiences, it doesn’t have to end there. We can learn to say yes to the entire life we’re living, whatever that life looks like at the moment. We can say yes to our appearance, our personality, our friendships, and our secular and spiritual work, all at once.
This is an important practice in a culture that encourages us to aim for perfection. That unattainable goal means that, when we take a step back to examine our lives, we often feel like things aren’t working out quite the way they should be. That’s when Mara pays a visit, and we have another opportunity for friendly questioning and Radical Acceptance.
Perhaps, if your life isn’t “right,” the question could be, “Right compared to what?” What standard are you setting, and is it even attainable? Why should that be necessary for happiness? Rather than fighting against your own story of what life should be, invite your current messy, imperfect life to sit with you and have a cup of tea.
The body is a good place to begin this friendly questioning. We experience life through our bodies, yet are often so wrapped up in our thoughts that we miss out on a lot of it. Some people have described the experience as only being alive from the neck up; so busy with thoughts and worries that they aren’t fully aware of their bodies.
Even when we’re aware of a strong physical sensation, like a cool breeze or the sound of rain, we’re almost never fully present in the moment; we have an inner monologue running over it. When we hug a friend, are we fully appreciating the hug? Or are we thinking about how long to hold it, and what to say after letting go? The Buddha called this constant torrent of thoughts the waterfall, a strong current that carries us away from the moment.
The waterfall happens because our minds instantly and unconsciously judge everything we experience as either pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. However, what it’s actually judging are the physical sensations, the sensory input it’s getting from the body. The smell of cookies or the feeling of a soft blanket on the skin is pleasant, and the brain wants to pursue it. A sudden, loud noise is unpleasant, and the brain wants to escape or defend against it. Something neutral, like an empty space on a wall, usually drives us to direct our attention somewhere else, looking for something more stimulating.
To escape the waterfall, the Buddha recommended centering your mindfulness on your body. Physical sensations are the beginnings of thoughts and feelings. The trick is to recognize those thoughts and feelings as they arise, and then let them go; keep returning to the immediate physical experience.
Remember the habit of friendly questioning. When you’re focused on physical experiences, don’t ask yourself how you feel; instead, ask how your body feels. Are there areas of tension or pain? Is there an especially pleasant sensation you’re feeling, like the comfort of a soft cushion or a gentle breeze? Are you fully present in your body, or do parts of you feel cut off from the whole? Do you really feel your hand, for example, or are you merely aware of it? These are a few examples of questions you can use to check in with your current physical experience.
It can be difficult, especially in modern cultures, to let go of the constant flow of thoughts. We’re trained from childhood to be vigilant and reactive; we attempt to monitor and control everything. A student participating in a meditation retreat once said that letting go of thoughts and being mindful of sensations made him anxious. He felt like he was going to miss important things, or a sudden situation would catch him unprepared.
Pain, while unpleasant, serves an important purpose. It warns us that there’s some kind of danger, and that we should take appropriate steps to avoid injury. If we’re touching something hot, we pull away; if we’re already hurt, we rest to avoid hurting ourselves more.
However, pain often triggers a harmful fear response as well. It comes with the internal narrative that something is wrong—something more than just the immediate danger. As we discussed earlier, the story that “something is wrong” frequently turns into “something is wrong with me.” In Western cultures especially, pain is regarded as something bad or wrong, something to be avoided if possible and destroyed if not. That’s why we take painkillers for everything from headaches to colds, shooting the messenger instead of listening to what it’s telling us.
All too often, people experiencing pain will compound their own suffering with stories about how it’s their own fault that they’re hurting—that they didn’t take care of themselves properly, or that they did something foolish and injured themselves. They may worry that the pain won’t ever stop, or that they’ll never be the same again. Even in those unfortunate circumstances where pain does signal something permanently wrong, they might worsen their own situation by conflating “never being the same again” with “never being happy again.” It’s easy to see how the waterfall sweeps us away from the physical experience of the moment—pain—and into something far worse.
For people who have suffered serious trauma, the effect is even more extreme. Many of them will dissociate from their physical bodies completely, experiencing their own lives as if watching somebody else. It’s a defense mechanism, yet one that just causes more suffering in the long run. Like the man running from his own shadow, the trauma doesn’t go away just because we ignore it. Sooner or later we have to either face it, or run ourselves to death trying to get away.
Pain isn’t good or evil, it’s just information. However, the fear and trauma that often come with pain take us outside of our own bodies, away from our physical experiences.
Reconnecting with ourselves can be difficult. It requires recognizing and welcoming things we’d prefer to avoid: inviting Mara in for tea, so to speak. It takes patience, meditation, and Radical Acceptance. In serious cases, it can require the help of a teacher or a therapist.
However, once we’re fully connected and accepting of our experiences, we can face each moment as it comes. We can accept each moment’s pleasures and pains without being swept away in thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves. Life will seem richer and more vibrant, because we’ll once again be living it fully, rather than only being alive “from the neck up.”
Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Starting with the top of your head, do a slow and thorough examination of your entire body. Don’t look with your eyes; instead, simply allow your consciousness to inhabit each part of your body fully and consider what it’s telling you, without trying to judge or change any part of it.
What in particular stood out to you as you did your check in?
What do you think those sensations might be trying to tell you?
In Chapter 6 we discuss desire: what it really is, how it affects us, and how we can meet it with Radical Acceptance. We also explore how there’s often a deeper desire underneath the superficial one we’re experiencing—for example, desire for a person might be masking our deeper desire to be loved and appreciated.
The key lesson is that desire is not inherently wrong or sinful, and experiencing desire doesn’t mean that we’re bad people.
There’s a common misconception that Buddhism is anti-pleasure and anti-desire. People can come away with the impression that they’re not supposed to want things, or to pursue those wants. In fact, Buddha’s teachings were never about eliminating or ignoring desire. As with all of our experiences, Buddha merely urges us not to be ruled by it.
When we encounter desire in any form—whether it’s desire for food, companionship, a new gadget, or anything else—we should meet it without resistance and without letting it possess us. We should meet desire with mindfulness; in other words, with Radical Acceptance. In doing so, we’ll find that we can experience desire but live freely in spite of it.
The writer D.H. Lawrence once said that people who just do whatever they want at the moment aren’t free. On a superficial level it might feel like freedom, but their every action is being commanded by their desires. The Buddha’s teachings about desire are really about avoiding that false freedom.
Desire is natural and important. We want things because we have needs, ranging from basic survival to emotional and spiritual fulfillment. We naturally seek out things that fulfill those needs. Therefore, in its most fundamental form, “desire” is the desire to be alive.
The problem is that no matter how fulfilling an experience may be, it’s temporary. Everything from a good meal to a sexual encounter will fade away sooner or later, and take the feeling of satisfaction with it. When that happens, we once again find ourselves craving something.
This cycle of desire is closely related to feelings of unworthiness, and the trance those feelings put us into. We constantly tell ourselves that if we could just get that one new gadget, get into a relationship with a particular person, or accomplish some life goal, it’ll finally be enough.
We imagine that getting or accomplishing something will give us a lasting feeling of satisfaction, an escape from desire. However, because we focus on temporary experiences instead of the love and awareness at the core of our being—our “Buddha nature,” as the Dalai Lama would say—the gratification is equally temporary.
What we desire often relates to childhood needs that weren’t fulfilled. For example, someone whose parents didn’t acknowledge his talents might feel a constant desire for attention and validation. As with everything, there will be a physical aspect to his desire as well: Maybe he feels it as an aching in his chest, coupled with a thrill-seeking excitement that drives him to show off for people.
There’s also a physical reaction when our desires aren’t met. We draw in on ourselves, covering and protecting a vulnerable core. We experience shame for having those desires, and fear that we’ll never feel fulfilled. If our desires repeatedly go unfulfilled, we create an association: Wanting leads to fear and shame. This persistent collection of feelings creates the core of a wanting self: One that constantly feels desire, yet is afraid and ashamed of it.
Wanting selves will seek ways to escape from those painful feelings. We might dissociate from our physical bodies, or seek ways to numb the feelings with endless distractions. We might get lost in our own minds, caught up in obsessive thoughts and self-recrimination, looking for a way out while digging ourselves in deeper.
When our needs aren’t being met directly, we start looking for substitutes. Like the person whose parents didn’t appreciate his abilities, we might constantly seek to impress others with our skills and knowledge. We might endlessly chase money and power, or seek the more immediate satisfaction of food or drugs. However, all of these methods only strengthen the desires and their associated feelings: deprivation, isolation, and unworthiness.
The desires and the strategies we use to escape them become so much a part of our lives that they start to feel like part of us. For instance, someone who constantly seeks alcohol and sex might see himself as a “party animal.” He’s become so caught up in his substitutes, so alienated from his real, unfulfilled desires, that he thinks that’s who he really is.
Many mainstream religions, from Judaism and Christianty to Buddhism and Confucianism, teach that desire causes suffering. While this can be true, the lesson is often delivered with a lack of nuance that only makes matters worse. We come to believe that all desire is sinful, and that feeling it is a sign that we’re flawed and selfish. We berate ourselves for experiencing natural urges, and we fear the intensity of our own passions.
This incorrect understanding of desire leads to a natural—but equally wrong—conclusion. We think that somehow ridding ourselves of all desire is necessary for spiritual growth. An old Chinese story illustrates this misunderstanding, and how it’s common even among deeply spiritual people.
There was an old woman who had allowed a monk to live on her land for 20 years. She reasoned that after so much time, the monk—who was at this point a man in his prime—must have found some degree of enlightenment. She decided to test him: Rather than bringing the monk his food personally, she asked a beautiful young woman to do it for her, and to embrace the monk before she left.
Later that day, the old woman talked to the monk and asked what it had been like to be so close to such a beautiful woman. The monk replied that it had been like a dying tree rooted in a cold rock in winter; in other words, he’d felt no warmth, no life.
The woman was furious. She called the monk a fraud, threw him off her land, and burned down his hut.
Her response is confusing to people who misunderstand desire. To them, the monk’s answer seems virtuous. However, the monk was rejecting his experiences rather than meeting them with Radical Acceptance, then allowing them to pass. That’s not what enlightenment is. The woman understood this basic principle, and the monk didn’t—that’s why she considered him a fraud.
Instead of shutting down like the monk, we can encounter our desires using the mindfulness techniques from Chapter 5. When we find ourselves gripped by desire, we should begin by taking a pause. Don’t immediately chase after what you want; instead, recognize what’s happening to you and take a step back to observe your experience.
Since desire manifests as physical sensations, we can recognize and name those sensations to take away some of their power. Once that’s done, we can invite Mara in for tea: We can accept those feelings as our reality of the moment, and allow them to pass through us without ruling us.
For example, the monk from the story could have recognized that he felt the warmth of a young woman’s body pressed against his, and the physical—perhaps sexual—responses it created in him. Having done that, he could have accepted those experiences and allowed them to pass away without any lasting impact.
A key realization that comes from such mindfulness is that those desires and experiences aren’t our fault. We don’t create them, and we’re not to blame for them. They simply exist, and it’s up to us to accept them for what they are. This realization frees us from the fear and shame that come with unmet desires. We come to understand that experiencing desire doesn’t mean we’re flawed or sinful people—we’re simply people who have natural experiences.
When we open ourselves to desire, we may realize that what we want in that moment is a substitute for what we really long for. For example, someone who’s fixated on a particular person, caught up in romantic and erotic fantasies, might be covering up a deeper desire for love and belonging.
In other words, accepting our desires and examining them more deeply may give us insight into what forms our own wanting selves. What are the core desires we have? What have we been doing to try to meet those desires—what substitutes have we been using? What do we really want?
Through Radical Acceptance, we can free ourselves from the narratives we’ve built up around desire. The stories we tell ourselves about being victims of desire, fighting against desire, being people who chase unhealthy urges because we need something more than what we already have.
By continually accepting our desires as they arise, we may find that our ideas about what we desire become both deeper and simpler. For instance, we may move from desiring a particular person to desiring love, or acceptance, or comfort. Going a step further, we might realize that what we truly desire is available to us at any time.
Tara Brach shares her own experience with accepting desire. She was caught in powerful erotic fantasies about a particular person. At first she was ashamed of these experiences and resisted them, thinking that they were hindering her spirituality. However, when she realized that they were in fact part of her spirituality, she opened up to the desire.
Brach realized that it wasn’t actually that particular person she wanted. Rather, she wanted to love and be loved; that desire was coupled with fear and regret about all the opportunities she’d missed while focused on work or other mundane things.
She also realized that she didn’t need a romantic relationship to love or to be loved. She could open herself to the world, experiencing and appreciating everything and everyone in it. With that realization, she felt a connection to everything from the grass and trees around her, to the birds that would eat seeds out of her hands, to the other people she was meditating with. The experience wasn’t permanent, but she was able to tap into it more than once by remembering that sense of openness and longing.
This chapter begins much like the last one. This time we discuss the emotion of fear—why we experience it, why it’s necessary, and how to avoid becoming overwhelmed by it.
As always, Radical Acceptance is the key to meeting the experience of fear without getting swept away in it; however, we must also recognize that sometimes fear is too extreme to face alone. Therefore, this chapter also begins discussing the importance of community in our spiritual practice.
Like desire, fear is a natural force that helps keep us alive. Fear warns us of danger and prepares us—physically and mentally—to run, fight, or hide from it. In its purest form, fear is a desire for life and an aversion to death.
However, fear often goes beyond what’s needed to keep us alive. We may find ourselves tense and on guard, even when there’s no threat to our safety. Our minds may be working constantly, trying to figure out what will go wrong next. When this is the case, we’re in a state of defending our lives rather than living them.
The emotion of fear comes with powerful physical responses as well. Blood rushes to our extremities, our muscles tense, and we produce chemicals that heighten our awareness and physical abilities. We curl in on ourselves both physically and emotionally, protecting our most vulnerable areas.
When fear is a core part of who we are, this withdrawal becomes a habit. We might not even notice it in ourselves because it feels normal. However, people around us might see that we’re hunched over, our shoulders raised, our heads thrust forward in an unconscious attempt to protect ourselves.
Furthermore, the effect isn’t just physical. Fear also creates rigid, habitual thought patterns. The intense focus that helps us respond to real threats becomes obsession. Our minds, which are hardwired to look for patterns, tell us endless stories about what could go wrong and how we might avoid it.
We always place ourselves at the center of those stories. We tell ourselves that we’re alone, helpless, that we have to do something in order to take control. We start using survival strategies: Perhaps we try to be small and quiet, to avoid notice; or perhaps we go the other way, and lash out angrily to gain power over the situation. Like our desires, our deepest fears and our responses to them are often shaped by what we experienced as children.
Fear can carry us into a trance just like desire can and for the same reasons. Children often make sense of hurtful or frightening situations by blaming themselves, and that habit carries over into adulthood along with the fear. We aren’t just afraid; we’re afraid that we’re going to be punished for something, or we feel like we made a mistake and left ourselves vulnerable.
We’re in the trance of fear when worry and anxiety prevent us from existing fully in the moment. When we’re constantly withdrawn and tense, when our minds are hyperaware of our surroundings and telling us that these feelings are our own fault, we can’t accept and live our experiences.
As always, we can awaken from the trance by practicing mindfulness, beginning with the physical sensations we’re experiencing. We can observe that our hearts are racing, our hands are shaking, or that we feel too tightly wound—as if we might be about to spring into action or flee the situation. Identify each sensation, welcome it, and allow it to pass.
When we examine our fear and welcome it, we’ll come to understand that it’s not something we created—it’s not our fault. Like any other experience, we can allow the fear to rise up and fade away without affecting us. That allows us to tackle the source of the fear—the problem—with clarity and understanding.
While mindfulness and Radical Acceptance are effective ways out of the trance of fear, sometimes the fear is so intense that it seems impossible to face—it feels like inviting it in will destroy us. When that happens, we need to find sources of safety and strength that will allow us to overcome the fear.
Usually the easiest and most accessible way is to find people who can help. A friend, a teacher, or a therapist can often offer the support we need to look at our fears without being overwhelmed by them. When we face intense fear, it’s helpful to be reminded that we’re part of something greater than our fearful selves.
However, while seeking outside help is a good (and sometimes necessary) first step, ideally we’ll want to find that feeling of safety and belonging inside ourselves. Buddhism provides three fundamental refuges that we can retreat to for strength and peace.
1) The first refuge is the Buddha. Exactly what that means varies from person to person. For some people it’s the man Siddhartha Gautama, who faced Mara under the bodhi tree and reached enlightenment. For others it’s the Buddha’s enlightened heart and mind—much like a Christian might pray to Jesus or Mary, a buddhist might experience the Buddha as a higher power or presence that loves and cares for us all.
However, the real power of the Buddha’s story is in the idea that any of us could accomplish similar feats. Siddhartha was much like us before his awakening, and we have the same potential for enlightenment that he had. Therefore, the essence of taking refuge in Buddha is having faith in ourselves, in our own ability to awaken from the trance and reach enlightenment. In that sense, we might consider “the Buddha” to be our own Buddha nature.
2) The second refuge is dharma. Dharma is a Sanskrit word meaning natural laws, the way of things, or the truth. Seeking refuge in dharma means accepting and taking comfort in the knowledge that everything changes. It also means understanding that, in trying to cling to our pleasant experiences and fight our unpleasant ones, we put ourselves deeper into the trance of fear.
3) The third refuge is sangha, meaning community. Traditionally it means the spiritual community, the other aspirants who share your struggles and your search for spiritual freedom. More recently, particularly in Western cultures, it’s come to mean anyone who helps you pursue your own awakening. For example, seeing a therapist or talking to a friend with whom you can be open and vulnerable are two ways of taking refuge in sangha.
Sangha can also mean a larger community, not just the people in your immediate circle. This is closer to the original meaning, where you can take comfort from knowing that there are many people in the world who share your struggles and your hopes. Facing a personal fear is isolating; facing a shared fear makes us feel connected.
We all experience our fears differently, so each of us find one refuge or another more comforting or easier to access. It’s important to find what works for you.
Like all spiritual practices, developing a real sense of safety and belonging can take time—possibly years. However, doing so can transform how we relate to our fears. Once we don’t feel overwhelmed anymore, we can start meeting fear with Radical Acceptance.
A side note: For some people, meditation and mindfulness alone aren’t enough. Medication is a fiercely debated topic in many spiritual communities, but some people may find that they need it in order to gain control over their fears or other experiences.
For someone whose experiences are too overwhelming, medication can be the kindest response. Such treatments can work hand in hand with spiritual practice to help people overcome anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. By reducing the impact of those experiences, medications can help people to take the necessary pause and recognize what’s happening inside their bodies.
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.
Chapter 8 begins to discuss compassion in earnest: what it is, and how we can cultivate it in our own lives. Then, in Chapter 9 we start exploring how to bring that same openness and empathy to other peoples’ experiences.
The word compassion means “to feel with.” Compassion is when we respond to pain—our own or someone else’s—with tenderness and love. It goes directly against our societal conditioning, which tells us to run from pain. However, compassion allows us to embrace our experiences instead of constantly fighting against them. Far from avoiding pain, we have to intentionally focus our attention on it in order to cultivate compassion.
Pain, whether physical or emotional, can create an insidious trap. When we’re suffering, we tend to blame ourselves for it. Someone might tell himself that his back hurts because he doesn’t take proper care of himself, or that his relationship fell apart because he wasn’t attentive enough. This puts us into the trance of unworthiness. It also makes having compassion for ourselves difficult, because we feel like we deserve to suffer.
For many of us, offering compassion to others comes easily, but offering it to ourselves feels self-indulgent or even shameful. We might feel like we’re being needy, or that we don’t deserve to treat ourselves with compassion.
However, in many cases, compassion is necessary for emotional and spiritual healing. Meeting our own pain with compassion can start to undo the social conditioning that makes us feel ashamed. When we’re blocking out painful experiences, compassion helps to bring down the walls.
In Buddhism, we usually begin by being aware of our own pain. Once we’re able to respond to our own pain with compassion, we’ll be more open to meeting others with that same compassion. However, as we’ve said, some people find the opposite to be true; it’s easier for them to have compassion for others first, and then to bring that same attention to their own experiences. Either way, relating to pain with love instead of resistance is how we awaken compassion within ourselves.
As always, physical experiences are a good place to begin. Consider how your pain is manifesting. Even if it’s emotional distress, draw your attention to how it feels. For example: is your heart racing, or your stomach upset? Where are you holding tension in your body? These are the same kind of mindfulness exercises we’ve discussed before.
The next step is to meet that suffering with compassion. We can say to ourselves, “I care about this pain. May this pain kindle compassion.” It’ll probably feel strange at first, or even embarrassing—we aren’t used to offering ourselves compassion in this way. However, by continuing to practice compassion for our own pain, we can start to let go of our own pains and the insecurities that come with them.
The vulnerable parts of ourselves need comfort and support, so by offering that to ourselves we can find a new sense of openness and awareness. Instead of protecting ourselves by withdrawing, curling inward to protect ourselves, we can find the strength and security to open up to the world around us instead.
A side note: Holding ourselves with love and compassion doesn’t free us from responsibility for our actions. However, it does free us from the self-judgment and self-hatred that prevents us from responding with clarity and understanding. Remember the core of Radical Acceptance: We must understand and accept our experiences without being ruled by them.
There may be times when our pain or shame is too great to face alone. This is especially the case when our actions have harmed others. When we know that we’ve played a part in another’s suffering, it’s hard to believe that we deserve to feel better. When that’s the case, we often have to widen our awareness in order to hold the pain without it destroying us.
One of Brach’s students, a woman named Marian, found herself in such a position. She’d lost herself in alcoholism to cope with the pain of a messy divorce. As a result, Marian wasn’t aware that her new husband had been sneaking into her daughter’s room and sexually assaulting her while Marian was drunk or asleep downstairs.
When she finally learned what had been happening, Marian tormented herself with guilt and self-reproach. The pain and shame of knowing that she’d allowed her daughter to suffer so much seemed unbearable. Finally, Marian sought help from a former teacher of hers, a Jesuit priest.
The priest advised her that she was living in a place of pain. That place couldn’t be avoided, and there was no sense in trying to run or hide from it. However, if possible, she should try to remember that there was also a much greater place, the kingdom of God, which could hold both her pain and the love she needed to heal.
This story is reminiscent of the young Siddhartha Gautama, who sat watching the farmers work. Much as he realized that the world is big enough to hold both suffering and joy, Marian’s first step to healing was recognizing that the world (or, in her case, God) was big enough to hold both pain and love.
It might seem like the priest’s answer of seeking refuge in God is only applicable to Christians, or others who follow God-centered religions. However, we all tend to reach out to greater forces during difficult times. Someone suffering from a terrible headache might beg for the pain to stop, or someone who desperately wants something might plead for it to happen. We do this even if we don’t know who or what we’re asking for help—maybe we give this unspecified presence a label like “the universe.” No matter who or what we reach out to, the reason is the same: We feel alone, and we want the pain of isolation to end.
When we combine mindfulness practices with this type of reaching out, we can practice mindful prayer. With mindful prayer we reach both outward and inward: We look outward for help, support, and love, and we look inward to listen to the suffering that’s provoking our prayer. In doing so, we become both the one who is suffering and the one who offers compassion.
Mindful prayer allows us to touch our fear and our pain without getting lost in trances of judgment and feelings of unworthiness. Marian, the woman who didn’t know her daughter was being abused, found compassion that could hold both her pain and her daughter’s pain by practicing mindful prayer.
Like any kind of spiritual practice, mindful prayer becomes more powerful the more we practice it. Whenever we feel our hurts and our fears creeping in, we can reach both outward and inward. In doing so, we can accept the pain and use it as a gateway to compassion.
Compassion grows in circles. For example, we might start by finding compassion for our closest friends and family. From there, we could expand our compassion to include people we see, but may not know very well: Our friends’ parents, for example, or the people we regularly see at the gym or in classes. In embracing compassion, we might start to recognize how many people around us suffer with the same fears, insecurities, and pain that we do.
The final step is extending your awareness and compassion without limit—caring for everyone who’s suffering anywhere in the world, everyone who feels alone and afraid. This kind of awareness and compassion helps us as well; it reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with us when we feel hurt or scared; it’s simply part of being human.
In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is someone who could enter Nirvana (paradise), but chooses to stay on Earth and help others reach it instead. A bodhisattva is the embodiment of selflessness: Someone who forgoes ultimate happiness in order to help others find it. While many of us may not have the chance to enter Nirvana in our lifetimes, we can aspire to similar levels of compassion by continually growing our own circles.
When we’re caught up in our own stories, everyone else tends to become “other.” They seem separate from us, different, not quite real. We start assigning them roles, as if they’re characters in a show: Some are allies, some are enemies, and most of them don’t matter to us at all.
The more different people seem from us, the less real they tend to feel. It becomes easy to dismiss anyone of a different race, religion, or socioeconomic background. We focus on superficial aspects of people and assign them labels.
Those labels could be complimentary, like “star,” or even “hero.” However, they can also be derogatory, like “bum,” or “alcoholic.” Sometimes the labels are less concrete and more to do with behavior, like “boring,” “needy,” or “pushy.” By labeling people this way, we make it easier to view them as other.
Once we start seeing someone as a label, and not a real person with real feelings, we don’t consider their pain anymore. At this point we don’t just ignore them; we can hurt them without feeling anything ourselves. This method of other-ing people is what leads a father to disown his gay son, or a patriot to cheer when people on the other side of a war die.
This sense of “other” has its roots in biology. We’re programmed to look for members of our own group and shun those who look, or act, or even smell different. These habits used to help us keep ourselves and our relatives alive, and it’s a powerful instinct even in modern times.
However, it’s possible to lower our defenses. We can expand our idea of what our “group” is, enlarging it in the widening circles we discussed before. Doing so is another type of Radical Acceptance—accepting others as they are, without inventing stories or passing judgment. This is also key to feeling compassion like a bodhisattva does; a bodhisattva sees the entire world as his or her group.
There’s an old Sikh story that demonstrates what it means to see everything—not just all humans, but all living things—as real. In the story, an old master calls his two most faithful students to attend him. He gives each of them a chicken, and tells them to go someplace where nobody can see them and to kill the chicken.
One student immediately obeys. He goes behind a shed and slaughters the bird. The other walks around for hours, and eventually returns with the chicken still alive. He tells the master that his task was impossible, for there was nowhere he could go that the chicken wouldn’t see. The second student saw the chicken as a real being.
There will be times when even the people we’re closest to make us feel imposed upon, frustrated, scared, or disgusted. That doesn’t mean that we’re failing as compassionate beings, it just means that we need to turn our attention and our Radical Acceptance inward again. We need to understand and have compassion for our own experience. Then we can move outward and have compassion for the other person’s experience.
We may often find that our negative response toward this other person is because we’ve distanced ourselves from him or her. We may have accidentally reduced the other person to a label like “student” or “mother.” Practicing Radical Acceptance on our own reactions, and then expanding that compassion to encompass the other person, will allow us to engage with and care for that person.
Compassion for others often begins with the question “what do they need?” Practicing asking this question—both to ourselves and others—helps to get us away from our own needs and to act from a place of true compassion. For example, perhaps all someone really needs at a given moment is to be heard and understood. Someone who wants to be seen as helpful and competent might listen to that person, but then offer advice where it’s not wanted. Even if her intentions are good, she’s acting based on her needs rather than the other person’s.
However, compassion can go beyond just understanding another person’s needs. Imagining yourself in another person’s shoes is the very heart of compassion—what would it be like to inhabit that person’s mind and body, to exist in his or her circumstances?
There’s a psychological technique called role reversal that’s designed to encourage this type of compassion. For example, say that a husband and wife were having marital difficulties. Role reversal would begin with one of them—perhaps the wife—describing her current experiences; how she perceives and feels about her current situation. Then the husband would pretend to be the wife, and try to speak from her perspective about those same issues. Next, the process would repeat with the focus on the husband’s experiences.
Role reversal is a formalized method of getting ourselves out of our own heads and into another person’s, as much as possible. However, we don’t have to go through that entire process every time we try to have compassion for someone else. It’s often enough to simply imagine what the other person may be thinking or feeling, and to consider how we could help.
We can have compassion for others or for our own suffering. Sit in a comfortable position that allows you to be both relaxed and focused, and bring a painful experience to mind. The pain can be your own or that of someone close to you—a family member, a friend, or even a pet.
What is the experience you thought of?
What prayer or expression of compassion comes to mind when you think about it? The statement could be as simple as “I care about your pain,” or “may you be freed from your suffering.”
Now consider all of the living beings in the world that are experiencing that same type of pain. Meditate on the realness of that suffering; breathe in their pain, and as you exhale, release it to your higher power or awareness of choice. As before, what prayer or compassionate expression comes to mind?
The final three chapters of Radical Acceptance shift the focus away from ourselves. Instead, we start discussing how to practice Radical Acceptance of others. We begin the shift in this chapter, by revisiting the idea of the essential goodness that exists in all of us. We begin by acknowledging that there will be times when we have trouble recognizing the goodness in ourselves and in others.
Therefore, this chapter discusses various ways to see people (including ourselves) differently. It goes over several practices we can use to see past the negative emotions and stories we’ve built up about ourselves and those around us, and to rediscover the Buddha nature in everyone.
When we feel betrayed (like by a cheating spouse, for example) we often lash out in anger. We attack the one who hurt us, and initially put the blame on him or her. However, many of our negative experiences also put us into the trance of unworthiness—we come to think that we’re having problems because there’s something wrong with us. Our outward resentment of that other person then reflects our inner resentment of ourselves—the betrayal confirms our feelings that we’re unworthy of love.
Resentment means “feeling again.” Each time we retell ourselves the story of how we were betrayed, we feel the anger of being betrayed all over again. In other words, we repeatedly hurt ourselves by reliving the hurtful experiences.
However, the basic goodness of our being—our Buddha nature—can’t be changed no matter how lost we are in our delusions and narratives. There’s an important difference between doing bad things and being a bad person; that distinction applies both to ourselves and to the people who hurt us.
Recognizing the difference between doing bad things and being a bad person—and therefore seeing the essential good in everyone—is a difficult task. It requires looking past harmful behaviors to see each person’s vulnerability and pain and the Buddha nature beneath all of that. It requires Radical Acceptance.
The first step is to recognize the goodness in ourselves. This often begins with forgiving ourselves for how we feel and what we might have done wrong. Forgiveness breaks down the barriers of blame and resentment that we build while trying to protect ourselves from pain. Those barriers are what keep us from experiencing the goodness and love that exists in ourselves and others. Therefore, by giving up on blame and opening our hearts to pain, we can begin to practice Radical Acceptance.
However, there may be times when our guilt and shame are so strong that we can’t forgive ourselves. This is especially the case when we believe that we’ve truly, deeply hurt somebody else. Perhaps we don’t think we deserve forgiveness, or we can’t see the point in it since the damage is already done.
In cases like that, instead of forgiving ourselves, we can try forgiving the shame itself. Rather than fighting the feeling, we can forgive it for existing and welcome it in, like the Buddha welcoming Mara in for tea. In doing so, we will allow the feeling to pass through us and fade away.
We might then find other feelings buried under the shame, such as fear or anger. We can meet those experiences in the same way: We can welcome them in, sit with them, and forgive them for existing.
This practice is effective because we’re giving our experiences permission to be what they are. Instead of trying to control our grief, pain, or shame, we simply allow it to exist—to be as big and powerful as it needs to be.
Learning to forgive ourselves and see our own goodness takes time and practice. As with everything else we’ve discussed, the process starts with mindfulness—we recognize that we’re being judgmental or unkind to ourselves, and we forgive whatever we’re feeling.
Many people misunderstand this practice at first. They tend to think that accepting and forgiving hurtful behaviors is about letting people (themselves or others) off the hook for the pain they caused. However, forgiving a behavior or a feeling isn’t the same as condoning it—Radical Acceptance isn’t permission to keep doing harmful things. It’s facing past actions with understanding and compassion so that we can have a clear vision of the present and future.
For example, there are stories of death row inmates who faced up honestly to the harm they’d caused and learned to forgive themselves. By opening up to pain—their own and others’—they awakened compassion within themselves. By doing this, they were able to both take responsibility for the crimes they’d committed and recognize their own innate goodness.
Prisoners who accomplished this were visibly transformed. Guards, relatives, chaplains, and even other inmates all recognized that something had changed—that even though these people were in prison awaiting execution, they’d found a kind of inner freedom.
The main point is this: Holding on to blame and guilt might temporarily stop us from causing more harm, but in the long run it only creates more pain for ourselves and others. We can’t hate ourselves into being good people; only with forgiveness and Radical Acceptance can we find the wisdom and compassion to correctly respond to our situations.
When we’re lost in trances of unworthiness, guilt, or shame, there are several powerful practices we can use to look at ourselves differently and start to escape those feelings.
Think back to the practice of role reversal that we discussed in the previous chapter. Aside from encouraging compassion for other people, role reversal can also help us learn to love ourselves again.
Those around us often see positive qualities that we’re too lost in our own trances to see. For example, someone who likes to ask questions might think that he’s annoying, but his friends might love him for his wonder and enthusiasm. Seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes can help to remind us of our best qualities, and the things that others admire about us. Practicing role reversal with a loved one is a great way to do this.
We can also try to escape our trances by thinking about ourselves differently. By reminding ourselves of things that we admire about ourselves, we can reawaken love and compassion. For example, an animal lover might think about the time she took in a stray dog, and how much joy she was able to bring to that creature’s life. Touchstones such as pictures or souvenirs can also be helpful reminders.
Finally, it can help to remember the love of a higher power. Again, this power could be God, Buddha, or something nonspecific like the universe. Brach illustrates this idea with a short anecdote.
A woman got addicted to heroin and wound up in the hospital, dying of AIDS. She was in despair because all she could think about was how she had destroyed her life and the lives of everyone around her, including her daughter.
A priest came to visit the woman on her deathbed, and he saw that she had a picture of her daughter on the dresser. He asked what would happen if the daughter made a mistake: Would the woman try to help her? Would she still love her? The dying woman answered that of course she would.
The priest’s parting words for the woman were that God had a picture of her on His dresser. That’s what forgiveness is: Not excusing the behavior, but loving the person regardless of it.
Other people have Buddha nature at the core of their beings, just like we do. If we concentrate on seeing past everything extraneous like people’s appearance, actions, and our own labels for them, we start to see that we’re all essentially the same: beings made of love and awareness. There are various techniques that can help us see this basic goodness in others.
One practice is to imagine other people as children. No matter how frustrated parents may get with their children, many of them will feel simple, powerful love during quiet times—times when the child isn’t asking for yet another cookie or bothering the parent during an important meeting. As with children, we don’t necessarily dislike people just because we’re frustrated with their behavior.
Another method is to imagine that you’re meeting someone for the first time. Let go of your history with that person and your habitual labels for him or her. Simply encounter people as they are in that moment, not as you imagine them based on past interactions.
Finally, imagine that you’re seeing someone for the last time. What do you admire about that person? What would you want to remember if you knew you’d never see him or her again?
Seeing the essential goodness in people naturally awakens what Buddhists call metta, translated as “lovingkindness.” Simply put, it’s a wish for someone’s health and happiness.
Like with compassion, there are practices to awaken this feeling of lovingkindness and expand it in ever-bigger circles. Traditionally we begin with ourselves—we reflect on our own goodness and offer wishes that we may be peaceful, happy, and filled with metta.
After that, we expand our circle of lovingkindness to include the people closest to us. It’s often easiest to begin with a single person, the one whose goodness is easiest for us to see. This could be a child, a parent, a grandparent, or a friend—there’s no “correct” person to choose.
Once we have someone in mind, we meditate on what we love about that person and offer him or her the same wish for happiness that we offered ourselves. Once that’s done. we can widen our circles of metta to include other people that we’re close to, then people we don’t know as well, then those we don’t know at all.
The most challenging part of this exercise is to experience lovingkindness for those who stir feelings of dislike or anger in us. Offering those people wishes of peace and happiness is likely to feel forced and hollow at first.
However, if we welcome those negative feelings about other people and let them pass, we can continue offering well-wishes. In doing so, we’ll find (to our own surprise) that those wishes start feeling more sincere. By offering care even when we don’t mean it, genuine caring feelings will start to awaken.
This practice of universal lovingkindness is based on the understanding that every person’s deepest wish is simply to be loved. According to the Buddha, lovingkindness is the single most important spiritual practice. Wishing for universal peace and happiness helps us to reconnect with the essential goodness that exists in all people.
Forgiving yourself is an important practice, but you may find that sometimes you don’t even know what you need to forgive yourself for. Before going to bed for the night, take some time to remember the day and scan your feelings to see if you’re holding anything against yourself from the day. Examples might be a mistake you made at work, or something you regret saying to someone else.
What are you regretting from the past day?
What, if anything, is blocking you from forgiving yourself for it?
If you can’t forgive yourself, can you forgive the feeling and let it be what it is?
Chapter 10 spoke about Radical Acceptance of others in fairly general terms. Now we’ll discuss specific ways to practice Radical Acceptance in our relationships with other people. This is a crucial step in spiritual growth—although spirituality is a deeply personal journey, humans are social beings by nature.
A lot of the pains and fears we carry are the results of our relationships with other people. Therefore, we can’t truly heal while isolating ourselves. Community is a powerful and necessary force, and Radical Acceptance can help us to fully engage with it just as it helps us engage with our own inner lives.
Much of what we’ve discussed so far has been focused on ourselves as individuals: personal meditations, personal growth, and so on. However, humans are social creatures, and our spiritual journey can’t happen in isolation—a great deal of our pain comes from our relationships with each other, and it can only be healed through relationships.
When we have awareness and compassion in our relationships—in other words, when we approach them with Radical Acceptance—they can be powerful tools for spiritual growth and healing.
Note that ”relationships” here doesn’t just mean romantic relationships. We have relationships with everyone we interact with: family, friends, teachers, colleagues, and so on.
We’ve discussed how practicing Radical Acceptance for ourselves teaches us that our own suffering isn’t wrong, and pain doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with us. We can get that same message from others, and give it back to them. Giving Radical Acceptance to others reminds them that they are inherently good and worthy of love. When we practice Radical Acceptance of others, and they practice Radical Acceptance of us, we can find wells of confidence and strength we never knew that we had.
For an example of what this strength can do, Radical Acceptance is the key to interventions for alcoholics or drug addicts. An intervention isn’t about confronting or attacking the addict. Instead, the key is to let the addict see and hear the people who love him in spite of the harm he’d caused to himself and others.
Communities have strength that individuals lack.
The Buddha called sangha—community—a treasure of the spiritual path. Indeed, sangha’s benefits are exemplified by the Buddha’s relationship with his cousin Ananda. Ananda saw to the Buddha’s material needs, and the Buddha offered Ananda unwavering spiritual guidance. Each supported the other and provided what he needed.
Opening our hearts to others can be a gift to them, as well as to us—it might make them feel welcome to do the same. For example, someone who’s nervous about performing in a show might share that feeling with their fellow performers. In doing so, not only is that person addressing her own fear, she’s opening the door for other people to share their own discomfort and offer mutual support.
Exposing our vulnerabilities in this way is always a risk, but we’ll suffer much worse pain if we keep ourselves isolated from one another.
A more extreme example of this practice is the healing ritual of a Zambian tribe. When a member of the tribe is suffering (physically or emotionally), the entire tribe comes together to perform the ritual. It begins when the one who’s suffering admits to whatever truths he or she has been keeping hidden: These could be things like secret grudges, hatred, or lust for other members of the tribe.
However, the ritual isn’t complete until every member of the tribe shares their own hidden truths. The ritual is based on the understanding that we’re all connected—one person’s suffering is everybody’s suffering, and therefore everybody must participate in the healing process.
Remember that one of the keys to Radical Acceptance is accepting pain for what it is, rather than taking it personally or thinking that it reflects on us as people. However, there will be times when someone’s pain is too great to face alone or it is something that he or she is unable to practice Radical Acceptance on. In times like that, sangha—community—is a powerful resource. When one person’s pain becomes the community’s shared suffering, we can also share our strength to cope with it.
The monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said that, in the West, Buddha is found in sangha. He meant that, because we have such a tendency to view ourselves as isolated individuals, devoting ourselves to each other instead is an especially powerful way for us to grow spiritually.
In this final chapter, we discuss how Radical Acceptance can help us finally see beyond the illusions and narratives that we build up around ourselves. Buddhists believe that there’s no such thing as the “self.” Buddhism teaches that each of us is part of a universal presence of awareness and love, rather than an individual entity. We’re born from that universal presence, and we return to it when we die.
Radical Acceptance is the practice of welcoming each experience as it comes, and remaining unaffected—however, it’s also the first step toward recognizing that the reason we’re unaffected is because there’s no “us” to be affected. We’re beings of awareness and love—not ego.
There will be times when we doubt that we really have Buddha nature—times when we feel angry, judgmental, unfocused, or self-conscious. At times like these, it’s helpful to remember the story of Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree.
Mara, the god of delusion and hatred, was the final obstacle between Siddhartha and enlightenment. After all of Mara’s frightening illusions and vicious attacks failed, his final challenge was a simple question: What gave Siddhartha the right to claim Buddhahood? Who was he to pursue enlightenment? In other words, Siddhartha’s final challenge was overcoming doubt.
You may recall that Siddhartha’s response was to touch the earth and call upon it to bear witness to his many, many past lives of compassion and love. It wasn’t Siddhartha himself that finally drove Mara away, but the universal awareness that Siddhartha was a part of. This part of the story is crucial to understanding both Buddhism and our own nature—remember, in Buddhism there is no “self.”
Just as Siddhartha touched the ground to connect with that universal awareness, we can touch the ground by being completely present in the moment, by experiencing and accepting everything around and inside of us. This will help us to move beyond our illusions of “self” and reconnect with our Buddha nature.
We can bring this self-less awareness into our lives through Radical Acceptance and meditation. Radical Acceptance will free us from the immediate pain of our negative emotions, but we may find that there’s still a part of us whispering stories of unworthiness and doubt.
At such times, we can ask who it is that’s aware of these feelings, who’s telling those stories. Is there still a “self” that we’re trying to pull into, to protect? We can experience that “self” in various ways; even as we relax into meditation and Radical Acceptance, we may still view ourselves as “one who’s meditating” or “one who’s observing myself.”
However, the Buddha said that holding onto any sense of self, including the self who’s observing oneself, blocks us from reaching true awareness. By repeatedly asking who it is that’s aware, we can eventually find that it’s nobody. Doing so may require cutting through many layers of delusion and repeatedly asking ourselves who is feeling, who is observing.
This step may be especially difficult for those who grew up in Western countries, where the self is all-important. However, through long practice and meditation, we can turn our awareness inward and realize that there’s no presence trying to control our experiences, no thoughts or desires—there’s only awareness itself, stretching both inward and outward without limits.
Reaching this state requires letting go of all of our thoughts, emotions, desires, and stories. Those are all illusions that hide our truest, innermost self—or, rather, our lack of self.
The clearest view of this universal, impersonal awareness and love might come when we’re suffering grief. Simply put, our grief is the recognition that a life we cherished is gone, and that everything we love is temporary.
However, if we meet that grief with Radical Acceptance, we can hold it with compassion and love. If we ask ourselves who it is that’s suffering, we can see past the grieving self and connect to the universal source of awareness and love that we all came from. That source is deathless and unchanging. The one we’ve lost is still part of it as surely as we ourselves are.
The essence of Radical Acceptance is engaging with the world—welcoming and loving each moment as it happens—while also sitting comfortably with the formless, universal awareness from which life comes and to which it returns.
There will be times when we suffer fear, doubt, or shame—times when Mara appears, one might say. At those times, like the Buddha, we can touch the ground. We can take a pause, and bring Radical Acceptance to the present moment.
In doing so, we’ll remember that we are beings of love. Our desire to awaken our own compassion can guide us through Mara’s illusions, no matter how frightening or all-consuming they might seem. However lost we become, we can always trust the universal, loving awareness that is our true nature—our Buddha nature. That is the heart of Radical Acceptance.