Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha Paperback – November 23, 2004 by Tara Brach

Description

Author: Brach Tara

Brand: Bantam

Color: White

Edition: Reprint

Features:

• Bantam

Package Dimensions: 25x206x283

Number Of Pages: 352

Release Date: 23-11-2004

Details: Product Description
For 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. Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully.
—from Radical Acceptance

“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork—all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she leads us to trust our innate goodness, showing how we can develop the balance of clear-sightedness and compassion that is the essence of
Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance does not mean self-indulgence or passivity. Instead it empowers genuine change: healing fear and shame and helping to build loving, authentic relationships. When we stop being at war with ourselves, we are free to live fully every precious moment of our lives.
Review
”
Radical Acceptance offers gentle wisdom and tender healing, a most excellent medicine for our unworthiness and longing. Breathe, soften, and let these compassionate teachings bless your heart.”
— Jack Kornfield, author of
A Path with Heart and
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
About the Author
Tara Brach, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist as well as a Buddhist lay priest and popular teacher of mindfulness (vipassana) meditation. She is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, D.C., and has conducted workshops at Spirit Rock Center, Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, and other retreat centers nationwide. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband, Jonathan Foust.

From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Trance of Unworthiness

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

For years I’ve had a recurring dream in which I am caught in a futile struggle to get somewhere. Sometimes I’m running up a hill; sometimes I am climbing over boulders or swimming against a current. Often a loved one is in trouble or something bad is about to happen. My mind is speeding frantically, but my body feels heavy and exhausted; I move as if through molasses. I know I should be able to handle the problem, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t get where I need to go. Completely alone and shadowed by the fear of failure, I am trapped in my dilemma. Nothing else in the world exists but that.

This dream captures the essence of the trance of unworthiness. In our dreams we often seem to be the protagonist in a pre-scripted drama, fated to react to our circumstances in a given way. We seem unaware that choices and options might exist. When we are in the trance and caught up in our stories and fears about how we might fail, we are in much the same state. 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. As in a dream, we take