Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

by Tara Brach

Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong?

The belief that we are deficient and unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved.

Chögyam Trungpa, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, writes, “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”

We do whatever we can to avoid the raw pain of feeling unworthy.

Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.

Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution’s design to protect us and help us to thrive. But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being.

This is how an embodied presence awakens us from a trance: We free ourselves at the ground level from the reactivity that perpetuates our suffering.

Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging. The more times we traverse this path—feeling the loneliness or craving, and inhabiting its immensity—the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself. Our longings don’t disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.

Compassion means to be with, feel with, suffer with. Classical Buddhist texts describe compassion as the quivering of the heart, a visceral tenderness in the face of suffering. In the Buddhist tradition, one who has realized the fullness of compassion and lives from compassion is called a bodhisattva. The bodhisattva’s path and teaching is that when we allow our hearts to be touched by suffering—our own or another’s—our natural compassion flowers. The bodhisattva’s aspiration is simple and powerful: “May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion.”

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. We are avoiding the disturbing, exciting and confusing emotions that are whipped up in relationships.

Our grief is the honest recognition that this cherished life is passing. No matter what we lose, we open to the ocean of grief because we are grieving all of this fleeting life. Yet our willingness to go into the black waters of loss reveals our source, the loving awareness that is deathless.

Radical Acceptance is the art of engaging fully in this world—wholeheartedly caring about the preciousness of life—while also resting in the formless awareness that allows this life to arise and pass away.