More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tara Brach
Read between
February 8 - April 13, 2021
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.
We long to belong and feel as if we don’t deserve to.
process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.
Spiritual awakening
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.
Recognizing the beliefs and fears that sustain the trance of unworthiness is the beginning of freedom.
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.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns. Entangled in the trance of unworthiness, we grow accustomed to caging ourselves in with self-judgment and anxiety, with restlessness and dissatisfaction.
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.
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.
When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment.
Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.
Radical Acceptance helps us to heal and move on, free from unconscious habits of self-hatred and blame.
It might be a tenacious and regular visitor, but realizing it wasn’t truth was wonderfully liberating.
Self judgment
Storm Jameson puts it: 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.
by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.
Take a breath
Carl Jung states in one of his key insights, the unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke expresses a deep understanding of the dragons all of us face: “How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
what’s happening right now? What inside you most needs attention?”
the realm of sensations is endlessly changing—sensations appear and vanish, shifting in intensity, texture, location. As we pay close attention to our physical experience, we see that it does not hold still for even a moment.
While there are times in our life we might have had no choice but to contract away from unbearable physical or emotional pain, our healing comes from reconnecting with those places in our body where that pain is stored.
Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body.
mind with stories about what will go wrong. Fear tells us we will lose our body, lose our mind, lose our friends, our family, the earth itself. Fear is the anticipation of future pain.
Most of us find ourselves stuck in fear from time to time, and we can greatly benefit from seeking help. In facing intense fear,we need to be reminded that we are part of something larger than our own frightened self. In the safe haven of belonging to others we can begin to discover the sanctuary of peace that dwells within our own being.
Fear
By taking refuge in the sangha of mothers who so love their children, she awakened what the Taoists call “the invincible shield of caring,” the safety of abiding in the heart.
There are no absolute recipes for the process of waking up from the trance of fear. In making choices on our path, it is important to ask ourselves whether or not they will serve awakening and freedom. Our best answers are found by honestly looking into our intentions.
“May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion.”
“to pay attention means we care, which means we really love.” Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.
We feel most “who we are” when we feel connected to each other and the world around us, when our hearts are open, generous and filled with love.
What do they really need?” Like so many of us, Father Theophane had assumed that true spiritual reflection focuses on our solitary self. But as the wise man reminded him, spiritual awakening is inextricably involved with others.
Longfellow writes, “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.”
Even if we don’t like someone, seeing their vulnerability allows us to open our heart to them.
“What does he or she need?” “What does this person fear?” “What is life like for this person?”
We are all journeying through the night with plans, breathing in and out this mysterious life.
Romaine Rolland says, “There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.”
The Cocktail Party, T. S. Eliot writes: What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have Changed since then … We must Also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a Stranger.
taking responsibility for causing pain to another, listening deeply to understand the person’s suffering, sincerely apologizing and renewing our resolve to act with compassion toward this person and all beings. Much like making amends in twelve-step programs, these simple yet powerful ways of paying attention and relating wisely with others open and free our heart.
To cover up the strong wants and fears we might feel in close relationships, we often hide behind our persona. We react to one another out of habit, instantaneously, lost in our patterns of defending, pretending, judging and distancing.
When Radical Acceptance is a container for our relationships, genuine intimacy becomes possible.
