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

by Tara Brach

While fear of pain is a natural human reaction, it is particularly dominant in our culture, where we consider pain as bad or wrong. Mistrusting our bodies, we try to control them in the same way that we try to manage the natural world.

Our natural hunger for food can become an ungovernable craving for food—ice cream, sweets, potato chips—comfort food or food to numb our feelings.

Our longing for sex and affection can become an anguished dependency on another human being to define and please us.

Addictive craving is extremely difficult to endure without acting out. As Oscar Wilde put it, “I can resist anything but temptation.”

We are taught to mistrust the wildness and intensity of our natural passions, to fear being out of control. Audre Lorde tells us, “We have been raised to fear…our deepest cravings…And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for…many facets of our own oppression…”