Accepting a situation does not mean that it has your approval or that you necessarily found it “acceptable” for your life. I particularly appreciated the chapter on how to accept fear and the accompanying meditation guide for how to work through fear to a place of acceptance and power. It is a skill set I need to develop in a bad way before I go through childbirth in a few months. :) 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. We use painkillers, assuming that whatever removes pain is the right thing to do. This includes all pain—the pains of childbirth and menstruating, the common cold and disease, aging and death. In our society’s cultural trance, rather than a natural phenomenon, pain is regarded as the enemy. Pain is the messenger we try to kill, not something we allow and embrace.” pg. 105 So the first step of radical acceptance is to practice the sacred art of pausing. This allows us to fully access our intelligence and heart. We tend to get caught up in familiar narratives or judge ourselves in familiar ways. So, if we can simply tune into what’s happening in our bodies, we can recognize particular feelings. When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.” pg. 86

So if the discussion comes to exchanging book titles this is the one I recommend as an introduction to what I'll roughly call a Buddhist approach to suffering. There are better books on meditation. There are better books on the Precepts--the founding concerns of Buddhist ethical life. There are better books on...Buddhist monastic life, lay life, activism, spirituality, sexuality, relation to psychotherapy, the tradition's kooks and heroes and Americanization.

Everyone has bad days. Difficulties are inevitable, and so much of life is out of your hands. But the one thing you can steer is your mindset. However, when they moved her to the new enclosure, she immediately went to one small corner of it and spent the rest of her life there, pacing around an area the size of her old cage. Mohini was trapped in her old patterns, unable to understand the freedom that she now had. The key lesson is that desire is not inherently wrong or sinful, and experiencing desire doesn’t mean that we’re bad people. Meet Desire With Wisdom

I have tried twice to read the Power of Now, and could never quite grasp what all the fuss was about. This book, Radical Acceptance, delivered the insights that I was supposed to get from the other book. It is basically talking about the same subjects, but Tara Brach brings a humanity to her approach that is sadly missing in Power of Now. It [meditation geared toward cultivating a state of peacefulness, energy or rapture] was a valuable training, but I found that when I was in emotional turmoil, these meditations at best only temporarily covered over my distress. I was manipulating my inner experience rather than being with what was actually happening. The Buddhist mindfulness practices, on the other hand, taught me to simply open and allow the changing stream of experience to move through me. When a harsh self-judgment appeared, I could recognize it simply as a passing thought. It might be a tenacious and regular visitor, but realizing it wasn’t truth was wonderfully liberating. . .I was no longer striving to rid myself of pain, rather I was learning to relate to the suffering I felt with care. From the very start, these practices carried me to a loving, open and accepting awareness that felt like my true nature.” pg. 43-44 There was a tiger named Mohini who lived at the Washington, D.C. National Zoo. She spent most of her life pacing around her 12x12 cage. Finally, biologists and zoo staff worked together to create what they thought would be an ideal enclosure: an area that covered several acres, complete with hills, a pond, and lots of different plants. They thought she’d be happy there.

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She has been persuing a spiritual path for many years and speaks with knowledge and compasison. Yet, she admits that when she is continuously approached by a difficult student or her son misses the bus and has to be rushed to school, she sometimes gets caught up in the anxieties and difficulties of just living life. Again and again, it is mentioned that she has to keep reminding herself of her spirituality. As an undergraduate at Clark University, Tara pursued a double major in psychology and political science. During this time, while working as a grassroots organizer for tenants’ rights, she also began attending yoga classes and exploring Eastern approaches to inner transformation. After college, she lived for ten years in an ashram—a spiritual community—where she practiced and taught both yoga and concentrative meditation. When she left the ashram and attended her first Buddhist Insight Meditation retreat, led by Joseph Goldstein, she realized she was home. “I had found wisdom teachings and practices that train the heart and mind in unconditional and loving presence,” she explains. “I knew that this was a path of true freedom.” One of the most common regrets experienced by people on their deathbeds is that they didn't live a life that was true to themselves. The core of our suffering often comes down to not feeling like we’re "enough." Brach terms this the "trance of unworthiness." The trance of unworthiness leads to shame and a 'tendency towards self-aversion, the feeling of being at war with oneself.' Being at war with oneself is a constant argument about what's wrong with us. If we believe that we have an abundance of flaws, we can't ever truly express ourselves or have the confidence to lead creative, spontaneous, rich, and abundant lives. What's more, have you ever tried to relax when you're anxious? It's impossible, right? This book offers much more than it first seems to. From introducing the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as applied to difficult experiences, it deepens and opens out into practices of radical compassion for oneself and others - radical lovingkindness. Working & practicing my way through this book very slowly over four months' time has been a tremendous gift. Tara Brach begins by teaching a new way of approaching emotionally intolerable situations - being overwhelmed and practically nonfunctional because of physical manifestations of anxiety, fear, desire, melancholy, depression, anger, embarrassment, as well as by a sense of unworthiness, guilt or shame. She delves into situations of interpersonal conflict, loss, grief, and learning to forgive when forgiveness seems impossible. How often do you wish that you could change aspects of your personality, or be more like the people that you admire? Many of us are caught up in a web of deficiency, and beat ourselves up for our so-called failures. While many of us wish that we could celebrate the accomplishments of others, sometimes we feel envious or have a heightened sense of our own inability to achieve our goals. Other times we may feel vulnerable when criticized or don't perform at our best. If you look at the people around you, most of them experience these exact feelings of unworthiness. The good news is that we can shift our mindset and learn, not only to accept ourselves, but to radically accept who we are.