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

by Tara Brach

As 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.

The practice of Radical Acceptance begins with our own pause under the bodhi tree. Just as the Buddha willingly opened himself to an encounter with Mara, we too can pause and make ourselves available to whatever life is offering us in each moment. In this way, as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we “keep our appointment with life.”

Pausing interrupts entrenched patterns of interaction.