Instead of feeling proud of yourself for overcoming challenges, you might resent how the day fell apart. You could even feel sad that you were met with so much misfortune, despite your best efforts. It’s also easy to mistakenly consider yes as a technique to get rid of unpleasant feelings and make us feel better. Saying yes is not a way of manipulating our experience, but rather an aid to opening to life as it is. While we might, as I experienced on retreat, say yes and feel lighter and happier, this is not necessarily what happens. If we say yes to a feeling of sadness, for instance, it might swell into full-blown grieving. Yet regardless of how our experience unfolds, by agreeing to what is here, we offer it the space to express and move through us.” pg. 83 There will be times when we doubt that we really have Buddha nature—times when we feel angry, judgmental, unfocused, or self-conscious. At times like these, it’s helpful to remember the story of Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our future attempts at managing our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance.” pg. 52 One of the most painful and pervasive forms of suffering in our culture is the belief that “something is wrong with me.” 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 think that, deep down, we are just not okay.

Our greatest needs are met when we relate to one another, when we are fully present in every moment instead of worrying about the past or future, and when we accept and revel in the beauty—and the pain—that’s always around us. The core of Radical Acceptance is the friendly question. Imagine that you’re talking to a friend about how her day went. You’re not looking to pass judgment or make any changes, you’re just curious and looking for insight. A powerful example of this is seen in the following anecdote. Let’s explore how we can embrace the two wings of radical acceptance, recognition, and compassion. Practice the Sacred Pause – The Wing of Recognition By building up these narratives around our experiences, we distance ourselves from the experiences themselves. The narratives often devolve into harmful mantras about how we have to do more, do better, be better to make the pain stop. Even our good experiences are tainted with anxiety because we don’t simply accept them as they happen. Two Aspects of Radical Acceptance

Her breaking down of specific concepts and applying them (somewhat) systematically is helpful and for most of the book, a breezy read (I found the last few chapters that I was losing a bit of patience), and her inclusion of specific exercises and meditations connected to each concept by chapter is helpful. As, to whatever degree it is, the book has some role as a discussion and instructional guide for practitioner/therapists interested in integrating meditative practices and Buddhist spirituality into their work it would have been extremely helpful, and in my mind helped her cause of this as a serious discussion, if she had spent some focused time and energy on the challenges of doing so, some cases that didn’t go so well, places where the two traditions can seem (and maybe or maybe not be) contradictory or incompatible. Many of us may be trapping ourselves without even realizing it. The following anecdote gives a literal example of this principle. Much of what we’ve discussed so far has been focused on ourselves as individuals: personal meditations, personal growth, and so on. However, humans are social creatures, and our spiritual journey can’t happen in isolation—a great deal of our pain comes from our relationships with each other, and it can only be healed through relationships. This course was previously offered on Udemy. If you have taken this course on Udemy and don’t want to take it again, please explore some of the other courses here. I first came to Buddhism because I was raised by an atheist and a new ager, and wanted to be part of an organized religion but felt uncomfortable with God and the Bible. Yet as much as I loved Buddhist philosophy, the spiritual communities that have sprung up around it here in the US can be difficult to navigate. The intense hierarchy of a collectivist based culture such as Tibet translates poorly into the individualistic one of the West, and both teachers and students here can easily loose their way. I was able to scratch the surface, but there was much that was lost on me. With our American drive for excellence and superiority, it's easy to be pretentious and competitive in one's quest for spiritual understanding, and all I can say for myself is that I'm very glad I am open to being mistaken.

Oftentimes, we simply react to problems as they arise. However, when we just react, we’re often responding from a place of negative emotion such as fear, anger, or frustration. Stopping for just a few seconds to observe and identify your current experience can help you respond to it with wisdom and clarity. The Essential PauseDecenter yourself. Not everything that happens is a reflection of you or your perceived flaws. Whatever’s going on at any given moment, remember that it’s not about you; it just is what it is. That’s the key to Radical Acceptance. Accepting Things as They Are Author Tara Brach is a clinical psychologist, and leading western teacher of Buddhist meditation. She’s the founder of the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, DC, and has practiced and taught meditation for over forty years – with an emphasis on vipassana (insight meditation). Brach teaches us how to develop compassion, and cultivate a mindful presence to emotionally heal and spiritually awaken. Accepting a situation does not mean that it has your approval or that you necessarily found it “acceptable” for your life.

Many times since then, especially when I’ve been caught up in tension or self-judgment, I have stopped and asked myself, ’What would it be like if I could accept life—accept this moment—exactly as it is?’ Regardless of which particular mental movie has been playing, just the intention to accept my experience begins to deepen my attention and soften my heart. As I grow more intimate with the actual waves of experience moving through me, the running commentary in my mind releases its grip, and the tension in my body begins to dissolve. Each time I begin again, wakefully allowing life to be as it is, I experience that vivid sense of arriving, of reentering the changing flow of experience. This ‘letting be’ is the gateway to being filled with wonder and fully alive.” pg. 44-45 Radical Acceptance is the practice of welcoming each experience as it comes, and remaining unaffected—however, it’s also the first step toward recognizing that the reason we’re unaffected is because there’s no “us” to be affected. We’re beings of awareness and love—not ego. Doubting Our GoodnessBut Radical Acceptance also means not overlooking another important truth: the endless creativity and possibility that exist in living. By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life will unfold, we open ourselves to hope so that we can move forward with vitality and will. As so beautifully modeled by actor Christopher Reeve after her was paralyzed in a riding accident, we can throw our full spirit into recovery—we can ‘go for it’ in physical therapy, in sustaining rich relationships with others, in growing and learning from whatever we experience. In fact, through his efforts Mr. Reeve has discovered a level of recovery formerly deemed impossible. By meeting our actual experience with the clarity and kindness of Radical Acceptance, we discover that whatever our circumstances, we remain free to live creatively, to love fully.” pg. 39 The RAIN of Self-Compassion includes the steps of RAIN, as well as some translations to other languages. Not overly impressive, but a nice and helpful book. Brach writes a treatise on how the integration of Buddhist spirituality and meditative practices (most often based in the Theravadan traditions of vipassana and metta) can partner with western psychotherapy to assist in healing and personal development. In Chapter 5, we recognize that every mental and emotional experience has a physical impact—and, therefore, what’s happening inside our bodies is an excellent place to begin our friendly questioning. We also discuss how trauma can cut us off from those physical sensations, and possible ways to reconnect with ourselves. Friendly Questioning

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 You can take your time and explore RAIN as a stand-alone meditation or move through the steps whenever challenging feelings arise. The most profound impact that this book had was not while I was reading it but later, when I would try and become frustrated at being unable to implement it's teachings. I would chastise myself or the book or ideas and suddenly become aware that I was falling into a pattern explicitly detailed here and given instructions on how to unravel the habits I had become so used to. I realized very early on that so many of the shitty, unhelpful therapists I saw in my twenties had read this book and adopted a quasi-understanding of it (in my judgement). I found it really unhelpful and destructive then and now, though now that I’ve read this book, I understand the heart of what they intended. Unfortunately they seemed to have used it as a way of denying and disregarding my feelings, which, I judge to be NOT the aim of this book... Welcome to reality. There's no such thing as perfection. Buddhism invites us to let go of perfection, to let go of being so future-focused, and instead just to embrace the goodness of who we really are. If we rid ourselves of the belief that we're flawed and "bad," then we can start focusing on what makes us good and worthy.Breaking out of these unhealthy thoughts and coping mechanisms begins with accepting everything about ourselves, our lives, and our experiences. This means being aware of everything that’s happening inside our minds at bodies at every moment and embracing it. It means not shying away from sorrow or pain. It means recognizing our desires and dislikes without judging ourselves for them or feeling forced to act upon them. (However, Radical Acceptance does not mean accepting harmful behavior, either from ourselves or anyone else.) For example, if we’re afraid, we might recognize that our minds are racing, our bodies are tense, and we feel compelled to run away. In doing this, we don’t try to change or manage the experience, we simply take it as-is. We can’t accept an experience until we clearly see what we’re accepting. As we lean into the experience of the moment—releasing our stories and gently holding our pain or desire—Radical Acceptance begins to unfold. The two parts of genuine acceptance—seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion—are as interdependent as the two wings of a great bird. Together, they enable us to fly and be free.” pg. 27