Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame

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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. Recognizing Essential Goodness Your merciless inner critic might also criticize your competence as a parent, employee, or spouse. And your feelings of suffering beget more suffering. The acronym RAIN is an easy-to-remember tool for practicing mindfulness and compassion using the following four steps: 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. Accepting Things as They Are

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. As an undergraduate at Clark University, Tara pursued a double major in psychology and political science. During this time, while working as a grassroots organizer for tenants’ rights, she also began attending yoga classes and exploring Eastern approaches to inner transformation. After college, she lived for ten years in an ashram—a spiritual community—where she practiced and taught both yoga and concentrative meditation. When she left the ashram and attended her first Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat, led by Joseph Goldstein, she realized she was home. “I had found wisdom teachings and practices that train the heart and mind in unconditional and loving presence,” she explains. “I knew that this was a path of true freedom.” You may think that all of this positive thinking and self-love means that we don't have to do any kind of self-reflection. Radical acceptance isn't about passively going along on life's journey or believing that we're all perfect. Instead, it's about empowering us to inspire change within ourselves. When our fear and shame don't encumber us, we can live more positively and embrace life and all of our relationships. We all commit mistakes, we all feel shame and guilt. But the first stage towards finding others�� forgiveness is accepting the pain, and feeling compassion for oneself.The wing of compassion is when we make space for our pain. Imagine yourself talking to a friend in distress. Most of the time, we're not looking to pass judgment or make any change; we're simply curious, looking for insight, and trying to show compassion. Along those same lines the author seemed to anticipate my mental rejection of the concepts. She would directly confront rationalizations, sarcastic comments or undermining doubts in a way that clearly demonstrated she understood the problems faced by her readers. One of the things I like about this book is the many sources it draws on. It is personal, telling, for example, of joining an ashram and having a falling out with its leader, of a divorce, of difficulties in raising her son. It draws on her professional work, relating stories of exchanges that, as a psychotherapist, she has had with her clients. And most of all it is literary, skillfully so. She retells and interprets stories from the tradition, as well as anecdotes from contemporary American life, all to the end of introducing the outlines of a kind of consciousness she calls "Radical Acceptance."

The 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. So the first step of radical acceptance is to practice the sacred art of pausing. This allows us to fully access our intelligence and heart. We tend to get caught up in familiar narratives or judge ourselves in familiar ways. So, if we can simply tune into what’s happening in our bodies, we can recognize particular feelings. I particularly appreciated the chapter on how to accept fear and the accompanying meditation guide for how to work through fear to a place of acceptance and power. It is a skill set I need to develop in a bad way before I go through childbirth in a few months. :) There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.” pg. 45 For 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. Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully.I first came to Buddhism because I was raised by an atheist and a new ager, and wanted to be part of an organized religion but felt uncomfortable with God and the Bible. Yet as much as I loved Buddhist philosophy, the spiritual communities that have sprung up around it here in the US can be difficult to navigate. The intense hierarchy of a collectivist based culture such as Tibet translates poorly into the individualistic one of the West, and both teachers and students here can easily loose their way. I was able to scratch the surface, but there was much that was lost on me. With our American drive for excellence and superiority, it's easy to be pretentious and competitive in one's quest for spiritual understanding, and all I can say for myself is that I'm very glad I am open to being mistaken.