Radical Acceptance – Embracing Life With The Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
I have come a long way in the last year, and it is thanks in no small part to a number of great books I have read, books which I have held sometimes as if I were holding the author’s hand and listening to their kind words of wisdom. Another such book I can now add to this book reviews blog is Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, a jewel of wisdom which comes from the Buddhist idea that we really need to open our hearts and minds to all our experience – including suffering – in order to live fully and happily. And that means to accept some things, and most of all to accept ourselves. It sounds so counterintuitive – to accept bad things, and especially to accept the bad things about ourselves – we are conditioned to want to improve every aspect of our lives. Neither Buddhism or Brach is saying this is wrong – but there are two ways of dealing with the things we cannot change – we can either mope, gnash our teeth and wail, or we can embrace it with acceptance and get on with it with a smile on our face!
Of course Brach does not put things as clumsily as I often do – but rather welcomes us into this philosophy through a number of personal and professional anecdotes which see Radical Acceptance in practice. Before I go any further I should note that although this book is written by a Buddhist teacher, it is very accessible and you by no means have to be familiar with Buddhism to learn something from this book – it is a mixture of Buddhism and therapy, leaning really towards a kind of therapy based on Buddhist principles (Brach is a therapist as well as a Buddhist). As soon as I started reading the book I had one of those “Yes! That’s exactly what I have experienced for 20 years” moments, as Brach related the all too familiar story of the “trance of unworthiness” many of us human beings so easily fall into. It is true that many successful people consider themselves failures, many of us fear that we are not clever enough, not attractive enough, not rich enough, not kind enough, and so on – we spend so much time listening to the voice of this trance that we hardly ever wake up to the true beauty and success of our lives, but Brach shows ways in which Radical Acceptance can help us to wake up and accept ourselves as we really are.
At the end of each chapter there are guided meditations and exercises to help the reader put the ideas into practice, from gentle awareness meditations to meditations and exercises to work on relationships and our reactions to negative emotions, making it a handy book to read and re-read, and try the meditations as you go along.