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

by Tara Brach

The teachings of the Buddha also helped undo my painful and mistaken notion that I was alone in my suffering, that it was a personal problem and somehow my fault.

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.

Yet because our habits of feeling insufficient are so strong, awakening from the trance involves not only inner resolve, but also an active training of the heart and mind.

Through Buddhist awareness practices, we free ourselves from the suffering of trance by learning to recognize what is true in the present moment, and by embracing whatever we see with an open heart. This 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.

As we free ourselves from the suffering of “something is wrong with me,” we trust and express the fullness of who we are.

You will be walking some night … It will be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape, and that you are guilty: you misread the complex instructions, you are not a member, you lost your card or never had one … Wendell Berry

We are living in a waking dream that completely defines and delimits our experience of life. The rest of the world is merely a backdrop as we struggle to get somewhere, to be a better person, to accomplish, to avoid making mistakes.

we continue to replay our worries and plans. Inherent in the trance is the belief that no matter how hard we try, we are always, in some way, falling short. 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:

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 feelings of unworthiness and alienation from others give rise to various forms of suffering. For some, the most glaring expression is addiction. It may be to alcohol, food or drugs. Others feel addicted to a relationship, dependent on a particular person or people in order to feel they are complete and that life is worth living. Some try to feel important through long hours of grueling work—an addiction that our culture often applauds. Some

Many of us live with an undercurrent of depression or hopelessness about ever feeling close to other people. We

Often students tell me that their habit of feeling chronically deficient has made them continually doubt that they are meditating correctly and mistrust that they are growing spiritually.

Whatever the reasons, the failure to relieve this suffering through spiritual practice can bring up a basic doubt about whether we can ever be truly happy and free.

Chögyam Trungpa, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, writes, “The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.” What I brought to my spiritual path included all my needs to be admired, all my insecurities about not being good enough, all my tendencies to judge my inner and outer world. The playing field was larger than my earlier pursuits, but the game was still the same: striving to be a different and better person. In retrospect, it is no surprise that my self-doubts were transferred intact into my spiritual life. Those who feel plagued by not being good enough are often drawn to idealistic worldviews that offer the possibility of purifying and transcending a flawed nature. This quest for perfection is based in the assumption that we must change ourselves to belong. We may listen longingly to the message that wholeness and goodness have always been our essence, yet still feel like outsiders, uninvited guests at the feast of life.

” While all humans feel ashamed of weakness and afraid of rejection, our Western culture is a breeding ground for the kind of shame and self-hatred the Dalai Lama couldn’t comprehend.

We learn early in life that any affiliation—with family and friends, at school or in the workplace—requires proving that we are worthy.

Mother Teresa’s surprising insight was: “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.”

Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion. In stark contrast to this trust in our inherent worth, our culture’s guiding myth is the story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden. We may forget its power because it seems so worn and familiar, but this story shapes and reflects the deep psyche of the West. 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 must redeem our sinful selves. 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, overcommitting and rushing—in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.

Immediately, their five-year-old daughter piped up with her own: “I’ll have a hot dog, french fries and a Coke.” “Oh no you won’t,” interjected the dad, and turning to the waitress he said, “She’ll have meat loaf, mashed potatoes, milk.” Looking at the child with a smile, the waitress said, “So, hon, what do you want on that hot dog?” When she left, the family sat stunned and silent. A few moments later the little girl, eyes shining, said, “She thinks I’m real.” My own mother was visiting when I told this story at my weekly meditation group in Washington, D.C. As we drove home from the class together, she turned to me and in a teary voice said, “That little girl in the restaurant was me.” She had never felt real in the eyes of her parents, she went on. Being an only child, she felt as if she was on the planet to be the person her parents wanted her to be. Her value rested solely on how well she represented them, and whether or not she made them proud. She was their object to manage and control, to show off or reprimand. Her opinions and feelings didn’t matter because, as she said, they didn’t see her as “her own person.” Her identity was based on pleasing others and the fear of not being liked if she didn’t. In her experience, she was not a real person who deserved respect and who, without any fabrication or effort, was lovable.

my mother too

most of us learn that our desires, fears and views don’t carry much weight, and that we need to be different and better if we are to belong.

Our culture, with its emphasis on self-reliance and independence—qualities deemed especially important for men—had reinforced the message. Despite his understanding, Jeff still felt that having needs made him unappealing, undesirable, even bad. As is the case for so many of us, any feeling of need brought up shame.

We do whatever we can to avoid the raw pain of feeling unworthy. Each time our deficiencies are exposed—to ourselves or others—we react, anxiously trying to cover our nakedness, like Adam and Eve after the fall. 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. We embark on one self-improvement project after another.

i do this

Certainly any of these activities can be undertaken in a wholesome way, but so often they are driven by anxious undercurrents of “not good enough.” Rather than relaxing and enjoying who we are and what we’re doing, we are comparing ourselves with an ideal and trying to make up for the difference.

hold back and play it safe rather than risking failure.

i do this

” Playing it safe requires that we avoid risky situations—which covers pretty much all of life. We might not take on leadership or responsibility at work, we might not risk being really intimate with others, we might hold back from expressing our creativity, from saying what we really mean, from being playful or affectionate. We withdraw from our experience of the present moment. We pull away from the raw feelings of fear and shame by incessantly telling ourselves stories about what is happening in our life. We keep certain key themes going: what we have to do, what has not worked out, what trouble might lie ahead, how others are viewing us, how others are (or are not) meeting our needs, how others are interfering or letting us down.

Because we live in a free-floating state of anxiety, we don’t even need a problem to set off a stream of disaster scenarios. Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.

critics. The running commentary in our mind reminds us over and over that we always screw up, that others are managing their lives so much more efficiently and successfully.

As cartoonist Jules Feiffer puts it: “I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father’s speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father’s walk, my father’s opinions and my mother’s contempt for my father.” 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.

this is what you do

The painful truth is that all of these strategies simply reinforce the very insecurities that sustain the trance of unworthiness. The more we anxiously tell ourselves stories about how we might fail or what is wrong with us or with others, the more we deepen the grooves—the neural pathways—that generate feelings of deficiency. Every time we hide a defeat we reinforce the fear that we are insufficient. When we strive to impress or outdo others, we strengthen the underlying belief that we are not good enough as we are. This doesn’t mean that we can’t compete in a healthy way, put wholehearted effort into work or acknowledge and take pleasure in our own competence. But when our efforts are driven by the fear that we are flawed, we deepen the trance of unworthiness.

main point

We also project these feelings outward and make others the enemy. The greater the fear, the more intense our hostility.

creating an enemy imparts a sense of control—we

going to the root of our suffering and seeing it clearly was the beginning of freedom. This was his first noble truth: Suffering or discontent is universal, and fully recognizing its existence is the first step on the path of awakening.

This perception of “selfness” imprisons us in endless rounds of craving and aversion.

I am afraid. This is my desire. The contemporary Thai Buddhist meditation master and writer Ajahn Buddhadasa refers to this habit of attaching a sense of self to our experience as “I-ing” and “my-ing.” We interpret everything we think and feel, and everything that happens to us, as in some way belonging to or caused by a self. Our most habitual and compelling feelings and thoughts define the core of who we think we are. If we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we experience that core as flawed.

AND CAUSED BY ... not caused by

When we take life personally by I-ing and my-ing, the universal sense that “something is wrong” easily solidifies into “something is wrong with me.”

Yet just this feeling of being a self, separate from others, brings up a fundamental assumption that I am not okay.

One-celled entities push away what is threatening and go toward what will enhance them. We humans have these same basic reflexes, but our grasping and aversion play out through a dauntingly complex array of physical, mental and emotional activities, many of them outside our ordinary awareness. 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.

We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world.

If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous and caring. We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive. Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.

amazing

Many people have told me that when they finally are able to see how long their life has been imprisoned by self-hatred and shame, they feel not only grief but also a sense of life-giving hope.

true freedom is being “without anxiety about imperfection.” This means accepting our human existence and all of life as it is.

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. D. H. Lawrence described our Western culture as being like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. “We are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs,” he wrote, “we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal.”

Our “greater needs” are met in relating lovingly with each other, relating with full presence to each moment, relating to the beauty and pain that is within and around us.

We free ourselves from the prison of trance as we stop the war against ourselves and, instead, learn to relate to our lives with a wise and compassionate heart.

Do I blame myself when I get sick? Do I feel I am not attractive enough? Am I dissatisfied with how my hair looks? Am I embarrassed about how my face and body are aging? Do I judge myself for being too heavy?

Do I judge myself for not being intelligent enough? Humorous? Interesting? Am I critical of myself for having obsessive thoughts? For having a repetitive,

Am I ashamed of myself for having bad thoughts—mean, judgmental or lusty thoughts? Do I consider myself a bad meditator because my mind is so busy?

Do I condemn myself for getting depressed? Am I ashamed of feeling jealous? Am I critical of myself for being impatient?

Intolerant? Do I feel that my anger or anxiety is a sign that I am not progressing on the spiritual path?