Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2009 by Tara Brach

«Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,» says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork, all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled.

Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations.

Step by step, she leads us to trust our innate goodness, showing how we can develop the balance of clear-sightedness and compassion that is the essence of Radical Acceptance.

Radical Acceptance does not mean self-indulgence or passivity. Instead it empowers genuine change: healing fear and shame and helping to build loving, authentic relationships.

When we stop being at war with ourselves, we are free to live fully every precious moment of our lives.

Tara Brach, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist. She is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, D.C., and has conducted workshops across the country. She lives in Great Falls, Virginia, with her husband, her mother, and three dogs.

Main ideas:

• Cultivation of mindfulness and compassion is what I call Radical Acceptance.
• Convinced that we are not good enough, we can never relax.
• Fears, insecurities and desires get passed along for generations.
• Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.
• Carl Rogers: «The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change».
• We amplify emotional pain with our judgments and stories.
• In a pause we simply discontinue whatever we are doing and become wholeheartedly present, attentive and, often, physically still. A pause is, by nature, time limited.
• Carl Jung: «The unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering».
• At the end of a long day, we may experience a natural pause when we lie down in bed and let everything go.
• When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
• Buddha’s promise: «Mindfulness of the body leads to happiness in this life, and the fullness of spiritual awakening».
• Compassion for ourselves naturally leads to compassion for others.
• Every being needs to be listened to, loved and understood.
• When we expose our own hurt or fear, we actually give others permission to be more authentic.
• When we get lost we need only pause, look at what is true, relax our heart and arrive again. This is the essence of Radical Acceptance.

Comments extracted from the book, they could be right or wrong, you decide for yourself:

• I was the furthest thing from my own best friend, I was continually harassed by an inner judge who was merciless, relentless, nit-picking, driving, often invisible but always on the job. I would never treat a friend the way I treated myself, without mercy or kindness.
• For so many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn’t take much (just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work) to make us feel that we are not okay.
• Cultivation of mindfulness and compassion is what I call Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance reverses our habit of living at war with experiences that are unfamiliar, frightening or intense. It is the necessary antidote to years of neglecting ourselves, years of judging and treating ourselves harshly, years of rejecting this moment’s experience. Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is. A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.
• In our dreams we often seem to be the protagonist in a pre-scripted drama, fated to react to our circumstances in a given way. We seem
• Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It’s a vicious cycle: The more deficiente we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel. Underneath our fear of being flawed is a more primal fear that something is wrong with life, that something bad is going to happen. Our reaction to this fear is to feel blame, even hatred, toward whatever we consider the source of the problem: ourselves, others, life itself.
• The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved.
• Convinced that we are not good enough, we can never relax. We stay on guard, monitoring ourselves for shortcomings. When we inevitably find them, we feel even more insecure and underserving. We have to try even harder.
• Chögyam Trungpa, contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher: «The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality».
• The quest for perfection is based in the assumption that we must change ourselves to belong.
• We are under pressure to compete with each other, to get ahead, to stand out as intelligent, attractive, capable, powerful, wealthy. Someone is always keeping score.
• Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.
• The message of «original sin» is unequivocal: Because of our basically flawed nature, we do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life. We are outcasts, and if we are to reenter the garden, we must redeem our sinful steps. We must overcome our flaws by controlling our bodies, controlling our emotions, controlling our natural surroundings, controlling other people. And we must strive tirelessly (working, acquiring, consuming, achieving, e-mailing, over-committing and rushing) in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.
• Fears, insecurities and desires get passed along for generations.
• Over the years we each develop a particular blend of strategies designed to hide our flaws and compensate for what we believe is wrong with us.
• Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.
• Staying on top of what is wrong with us gives us  the sense that we are controlling our impulses, disguising our weaknesses and possibly improving our character.
• The more inadequate we feel, the more uncomfortable it is to admit our faults.
• Blaming others temporarily relieves us from the weight of failure.
• Every time we hide a defeat we reinforce the fear that we are insufficient.
• When our efforts are driven by the fear that we are flawed, we deepen the trance of unworthiness.
• Creating an enemy imparts a sense of control, we feel superior, we feel right, we believe we are doing something about the problem. Directing anger at an enemy temporarily reduces our feelings of fear and vulnerability.
• Our most habitual and compelling feelings and thoughts define the core of who we think we are.
• When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.
• This book is about the process of embracing our lives.
• As you go through your day, pause occasionally to ask yourself, «This moment, do I accept myself just as I am?». Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.
• Carl Rogers: «The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change».
• Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns. We won’t be able to enjoy the possibilities before us.
• The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is  that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it.
• Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.
• If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness.
• We lose ourselves in thoughts about what is wrong, how long it will last, what we should do about it and how the pain reflects our unworthiness.
• We amplify emotional pain with our judgments and stories.
• Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.
• Mindfulness is the quality of awareness that recognizes exactly what is happening in our moment-to-moment experience.
• We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.
• Compassion is our capacity to relate in a tender and sympathetic way to what we perceive. Compassion honors our experience: it allows us to be intimate with the life of this moment as it is. Compassion makes our acceptance whole-hearted and complete.
• Instead of pushing away or judging our anger or despondency, compassion enables us to be softly and kindly present with our open wounds.
• It can give us confidence to remember that the Buddha nature that is our essence remains intact, no matter how lost we may be.
• The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening. The very nature of our heart is to care.
• The twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous talks about «hitting bottom» as the turning point where genuine recovery from addiction becomes possible.
• When we look directly at the bandaged place without denying or avoiding it, we become tender toward our human vulnerability. Our attention allows the light of wisdom and compassion to enter.
• It may sound as if I’m talking about resignation or self-indulgence, or excusing bad behavior. Radical Acceptance is not resignation.
• Radical Acceptance does not mean defining our selves by our limitations. It is not an excuse for withdrawal.
• Radical Acceptance means bringing a clear, kind attention to our capacities and limitations without giving our fear-based stories the power to shut down our lives.
• By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life will unfold, we open ourselves to hope so that we can move forward with vitality and will.
• While it’s important not to deny or suppress our desires, it’s also important to be aware of what motivates us and the effects of our behavior.
• Radical Acceptance does not make us passive.
• Radical Acceptance does not mean accepting a «self». When we say, «I accept myself as I am» we are not accepting a story about a good or bad self. Rather, we are accepting the immediate mental and sensory experience we interpret as self.
• The Buddhist mindfulness practices taught me to simply open and allow the changing stream of experience to move through me. When a harsh self-judgment appeared, I could recognize it simply as a passing thought. It might be a tenacious and regular visitor, but realizing it wasn’t truth was wonderfully liberating.
• The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.
• The particular sensations, emotions or thoughts that arise when we practice mindfulness are not so important. It is our willingness to become still and pay attention to our experience, whatever it may be, that plants the seeds of Radical Acceptance.
• Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal. In a pause we simply discontinue whatever we are doing and become wholeheartedly present, attentive and, often, physically still. A pause is, by nature, time limited. We resume our activities, but we do so with increased presence and more ability to make choices.
• When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.
• Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond.
• Often the moment when we most need to pause is exactly when it feels most intolerable to do so. pausing in a fit of anger, or when overwhelmed by sorrow or filled with desire, maybe the last thing we want to do.
• Though the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.
• Underneath «I shouldn’t be so angry» lies «There’s something wrong with me if I do».
• As happens in any addiction, the behaviors we use to keep us from pain only fuel our suffering. Not only do our escape strategies amplify the feeling that something is wrong with us, they stop us from attending to the very parts of ourselves that most need our attention to heal.
• Carl Jung: «The unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering».
• In the pause, we become available to whatever life brings us, including the unfaced, unfelt parts of our psyche.
• Until we stop our mental busyness, stop our endless activities, we have no way of knowing our actual experience.
• Even if only one person in a relationship practices pausing and opening with Radical Acceptance, this has the potential of freeing both from a painful impasse. Pausing interrupts entrenched patterns of interaction.
• We learn Radical Acceptance by practicing passing again and again.
• Actually there are many moments (showering, walking, driving) when we release our preoccupations and are simply aware and letting life be.
• At the end of a long day, we may experience a natural pause when we lie down in bed and let everything go.
• We touch the freedom that is possible in any moment when we are not grasping after our experience or resisting it.
• Like a rest note in a musical score, the pure stillness of a pause forms the background that lets the foreground take shape with clarity and freshness.
• Pausing is the gateway to Radical Acceptance. In the midst of a pause, we are giving room and attention to the life that is always streaming through us, the life that is habitually overlooked.
• Notice what you are experiencing as you inhabit the pause. What sensations are you aware of in your body? Do you feel anxious or restless as you try to step out of your mental stories? Do you feel pulled to resume your activity? Can you simply allow, for this moment, whatever is happening inside you?
• After you have completed the pause, notice if anything has changed when you return to doing.
• Rumi: «Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond».
• Nothing is wrong, whatever is happening is just «real life».
• Just as a relationship with a good friend is marked by understanding and compassion, we can learn to bring these same qualities to our own inner life.
• Pema Chödrön: «We are learning to make friends with ourselves, our life, at the most profound level possible».
• One  tool of mindfulness that can cut through our numbing trance is inquiry. «What is happening» We might also asks, «What wants my attention right now?» or, «What is asking for acceptance?». Then we attend, with genuine interest and care, listening to our heart, body and mind. Inquiry is not a kind of analytic digging, we are not trying to figure out. While inquiry may expose judgments and thoughts about what we feel is wrong, it focuses in our immediate feelings and sensations.
• The moment I recognize Mara, some of the power of that fear lessens, and with it, the self-judgment.
• Naming or noting is another tool of traditional mindfulness practice that we can apply when we’re lost. Mental noting, like inquiry, helps us recognize with care and gentleness the passing flow of thoughts, feelings and sensations.
• Anxiety may still be present, but the care and wakefulness I cultivate through noting allows me to feel more at home with myself.
• Naming an experience si not an attempt to nail an unpleasant experience or make it go away. Rather, it is a soft and gentle way of saying, «I see you, Mara». This attitude of Radical Acceptance makes if safe for the frightened and vulnerable parts of our being to let themselves be known.
• The practices of inquiry and noting are actually ways to wake us up to the fact that we are suffering. Caught up in our stories, we can effectively deny the truth of our experience.
• Recognizing that we are suffering is freeing, self-judgment falls away and we can regard ourselves with kindness.
• The instant we agree to feel fear or vulnerability, greed or agitation, we are holding our life with an unconditionally friendly heart.
• Yes is an inner practice of acceptance in which we are willingly allow our thoughts and feelings to naturally arise and pass away.
• Saying yes is not a way of manipulating our experience, but rather an aid to opening to life as it is. Regardless of how our experience unfolds, by agreeing to what is here, we offer it the space to express and more through us.
• It is not always wise to say yes to inner experience. If we have been traumatized in the past, old feelings of terror might be triggered. We might not have the balance or resiliency in a particular moment to meet our experience with unconditional friendliness, and our attempts at yes might actually end up flooding us with fear. It would be better instead to find a way to alleviate the fear, perhaps by seeking comfort with a friend, doing vigorous exercise or taking prescribed medication.
• The power of a smile to open and relax us is confirmed by modern science. The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight, fight or freeze response. A smile is the yes of unconditional friendliness that welcomes experience without fear.
• When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
• There is no need to strain, to run through a mental thesaurus to find the «right» word to describe your experience. Just notice what work arises in awareness and mentally repeat it to yourself in a soft tone. Sometimes there is no label that fits the mix of feelings that you are experiencing. In this case you might name one of the more dominant elements in the mix. The point is not to nail something down by getting it right, but to keep paying attention to the felt sense of what is real in this particular moment. «Is this true? Does this word describe what I am feeling now? If not, is there another word?» Continue this way, mentally noting your unfolding experience and checking your body to see what is most true in this moment.
• With practice, you will find that the smile is a simple and powerful way to reawaken the heart at any moment of the day.
• Bringing Radical Acceptance into our life starts at this most basic level, becoming aware of the sensations that are continually taking place in our physical being.
• Henry David Thoreau: «Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows».
• Buddha’s promise: «Mindfulness of the body leads to happiness in this life, and the fullness of spiritual awakening».
• We experience our lives through our bodies whether we are aware of it or not. Yet we are usually so mesmerized by our ideas about the world that we miss out on much of our direct sensory experience.
• Hameed Ali, author and contemporary spiritual teacher: «I want to know whether you are in your feet, or just have feet. Do you live in them, or are they just things you use when you walk? Are you in your belly, or do you just know vaguely that you have a belly? Or is it just for food?».
• When we are quiet, we can more readily notice our changing stream of experience: of vibration, pulsing, pressure, heat, light, tastes, images and sounds. The inner world is often covered over by waves of emotions and endless stream of comments and judgments, memories and stories of the future, worries and plans.
• The mind instantly and unconsciously assesses whatever we experience as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
• When these sensations are unrecognized, our lives are lost in the waterfall or reactivity, we disconnect from living presence, from full awareness, from our heart.
• Because our pleasant or unpleasant sensations so quickly trigger a chain reaction of emotions and mental stories, a central part of our training is to recognize the arising of thoughts and return over and over to our immediate sensory experience.
• The basic meditation instructions given by the Buddha were to be mindful of the changing stream of sensations without trying to hold on to any of them, change them or resist them. We train to experience the body from the inside out.
• Like every aspect of our evolutionary design, the unpleasant sensations we call pain are an intelligent part of our survival equipment: pain is our body’s call to pay attention, or take care of ourselves.
• While fear of pain is a natural human reaction, it is particularly dominant in our culture, where we consider pain as bad or wrong. Mistrusting our bodies, we try to control them in the same way that we try to manage the natural world. We use painkillers, assuming that whatever removes pain is the right thing to do. This includes all pain, the pains of childbirth and menstruating, the common cold and disease, aging and death. In our society’s cultura trance, rather than a natural phenomenon, pain is regarded as the enemy. Pain is the messenger we try to kill, not something we allow and embrace.
• The Buddha taught that we suffer when we cling to or resits experience, when we want life different than it is.
• When we are mindful of pain rather than reactive, we do not contract into the experience of a victimized, suffering self. Reacting to sensations with fear, perceiving them as «wrong» initiates the trance.
• The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat our pain.
• When pain is traumatic, the trance can become full-blown and sustained. The victim pulls away from pain in the body with such fearful intensity that the conscious connection between body and mind is severed. This is called dissociation. All of us to some degree disconnect from our bodies, but when we live bound in fear of perceived ever-present danger, finding our way back can be a long and delicate process.
• Neuropsychology tells us that traumatic abuse causes lasting changes by affecting our physiology, nervous system and brain chemistry.
• Alice Miller tells us that there is not way to avoid what’s in the body. We either pay attention to it, or we suffer the consequence.
• Alice Miller: «The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is  as uncorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth».
• No matter how deeply we have been wounded, when we listen to the inner voice that calls us back to our bodies, back to wholeness, we begin our journey.
• Rumi: «The cure for the pain is in the pain».
• Learning to bring Radical Acceptance to our physical experience is usually a gradual process.
• Being at home with our body does not require us to focus for sustained periods of time on overwhelming physical or emotional pain.
• By inhabiting our body with awareness, we reclaim our life and our spirit.
• In daily life, return to the experience of your body as often as possible. What happens when you feel angry? When you are stressed and racing against time? When you feel criticized or insulted by someone? When you feel excited or happy? Pay particular attention to the difference between being inside thoughts and awakening again to the immediate experience of sensations.
• Over time if you practice mindful presence of pain for even a few moments at a time, equanimity will increase. You will be able to more readily let go of resistance and open to unpleasant sensations.
• It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.
• Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are.
• We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing (our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in). We can’t hold on to anything (a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self) because all things come and go.
• We perpetually lean into the next moment, hoping it will offer the satisfaction that the present moment does not.
• No amount of productivity or consuming or recognition can break through the trance of unworthiness and put us in touch with the «deepest self».
• We can honor desire as a life force, but still see how it causes suffering when it takes over our life.
• In India it is said that when a pickpocket sees a saint, he or she sees only the saint’s pocket.
• Equating spiritual purity with elimination of desire is a common misunderstanding I also see in students on the Buddhist path. The struggle to understand the relationship between awakening and desire in the context of the Buddhist teachings has gone on since the time of the Buddha himself.
• If we push away desire, we disconnect from our tenderness and we harden against life. We become like a «rock in winter». When we reject desire, we reject the very source of our love and aliveness.
• Pema Chödrön: «When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone».
• The Buddha taught that by being aware of desire, we free ourselves from identifying with it.
• While the affect of fear itself lasts but a few seconds, the emotion of fear persists for as long as the affect continues to be stimulated by fearful thoughts and memories.
• The first step in finding a basic sense of safety is to discover our connectedness with others. As we begin to trust the reality of belonging, the stranglehold of fear loosens its grip.
• In Buddhism, the three fundamental refuges are the Buddha (our awakened nature), the dharma (the path or the way), and the sangha (the community of spiritual aspirants). In these refuges we find genuine safety and peace. In their shelter we can face and awaken the trance of fear.
• When fear is too overwhelming, medical intervention, at least for a period of time may be the most compassionate response.
• When we relate to fear rather than from fear, our sense of who we are begins to shift. Instead of being trapped in and defined by our experiences, we recognize them as a changing stream of thoughts and feelings.
• In the face of fear, letting go of what seems to be our lifeline is the last thing we want to do.
• Letting go into fear, accepting it, may seem counterintuitive. Yet because fear is an intrinsic part of being alive, resisting it means resisting life.
• The habit of avoidance seeps into very aspect of our life.
• The key to awakening from the bonds of fear is to move from our mental stories into immediate contact with the sensation of fear (the squeezing, pressing, burning, trembling, quaking, jittering life in our body).
• Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that, we love freely and are whole.
• Compassion means to be with, feel with, suffer with.
• Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from t he self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.
• J. Krishnamurti: «To pay attention means we care, which means we really love». Attention is the most basic form of love.
• Compassion for ourselves naturally leads to compassion for others.
• Involvement with our personal desires and concerns prevents us from paying close attention to anyone else, those around us (even family and friends) can become unreal, two-dimensional cardboard figures, not humans with wants and fears and throbbing hearts.
• Longfellow, poet: «If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility».
• We need to befriend what is happening inside us before compassion for others can naturally arise.
• Sometimes the very people we are closest to become unreal to us. We might easily assume we know what life is like for them and forget that, like us, they are always changing, their experience is always new.
• Every being needs to be listened to, loved and understood.
• The more fully we offer our attention, the more deeply we realize that what matters most in life is being kind.
• As we bring a kind attention to our own conscious and vulnerable being, we become more alert to how all beings are sentient, how they hurt and want to stay alive.
• While it is easy to get caught up in believing we should be doing something more or different, what really matters is that we care.
• When we harm ourselves or others, it is not because we are bad but because we are ignorant. To be ignorant is to ignore the truth that we are connected to all of life.
• This is the essence of forgiveness. Whether we are angry with ourselves or others, we forgive by letting go of blame and opening to the pain we have tried to push away.
• We can’t punish ourselves into being a good person. Only by holding ourselves with the compassion of forgiveness do we experience our goodness and respond to our circumstances with wisdom and care.
• Sometimes the easiest way to appreciate ourselves is by looking through the eyes of someone who loves us.
• Every time we betray ourselves by not seeing our goodness, we break our heart. When we judge ourselves for falling short, we break our heart.
• How we see ourselves is deeply influenced by our relationships.
• Our imperfections don’t taint our basic goodness.
• Feeling forgiven is a sure way to open the heart.
• We maintain the intention to forgive because we understand that not forgiving hardens and imprisons our heart.
• Our intention and willingness to forgive, to let go of resentment and blame, does not mean that we excuse harmful behaviors or allow further injury.
• When we forgive, we stop rigidly identifying others by their undesirable behavior. Without denying anything, we open our heart and mind wide enough to see the deeper truth of who they are.
• As we practice sending wishes for happiness and peace to ourselves and to others, we touch the beauty and purity of our true nature.
• When Matt called me that night, he said his deepest prayer was to never forge that «everybody just wants to be loved».
• Thich Nhat Hanh: «When you say something like [I love you] … with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world».
• When you realize you are judging yourself or another person harshly, you might pause and become aware of the thoughts and feelings of blaming.
• If we consider our practice to be «spiritual» only when it takes place in the context of formal meditations, we are missing how critical daily relationships are to our awakening.
• When we expose our own hurt or fear, we actually give others permission to be more authentic.
• The greater hurt, the real suffering, is in staying armored and isolated. While it takes courage to be vulnerable, the reward is sweet.
• When others accept us exactly as we are, it does not mean they like everything we do. It does not mean that they will passively stand by if we are injuring ourselves or others.
• Not taking pain personally is essential to Radical Acceptance. As the Buddha taught, life’s difficulties are not owned or caused by an individual, our changing states of body and mind are influenced by myriad variables. When we recognize this, remaining open and vulnerable and accepting with each other, we heal together.
• When my fear or my shame becomes our shared suffering, Radical Acceptance flowers.
• T. S. Eliot: «Here, now, always».
• I periodically asked myself, «Who am I taking myself to be?».
• The Buddha taught that holding on to anything, including a sense of being the observer, obscures the full freedom of awareness.
• We can pull the curtain on this faint aura of self-ness by asking, «Who is aware?» We might also ask, «What is aware?» or, «Who am I?» or, «Who is thinking?». We bring mindfulness to awareness itself. We look into awareness. By inquiring and then looking into awareness, we can cut through and dispel the deepest illusions of self that have held us separate and bound.
• When we look within, there is not entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness, open empty awareness. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call «the supreme seeing». But this emptiness, this «no-thingness» is not empty of life.
• The path of awakening is simply a process of wakeful, profound relaxing. We see what is here right now and we let go into life exactly as it is.
• When we live in awareness, we live in love.
• When we get lost we need only pause, look at what is true, relax our heart and arrive again. This is the essence of Radical Acceptance.

Have you read this book? Any other similar book? Do you have anything to say about what this book is saying? Do you recommend any book related to this matter? Anything at all? I’ll be glad to know what you think about it in the comments.

Some related links:

• Blogs: 1, 2 & 3
• Official site.
• Wikipedia.
• Goodreads.

Some related books:

• Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, M.D..
• The Worry Cure by Dr Robert L. Leahy.
• Feeling Great by David D. Burns, MD.
• Taking Responsibility by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D..
• ACT made simple by Russ Harris.
• One small step can change your life by Robert Maurer, Ph. D..
• Active listening & Emotional validation by Emily Wright.
• Sé amable contigo mismo de Kristin Neff.
• The body keeps the score by M.D. Bessel Van Der Kolk.
• El libro del mindfulness de Bhante Henepola Gunaratana.

raul