Book Review:  Radical Acceptance

Have you noticed that when you have a strong emotion—anger, fear, sadness—it is often accompanied by a strong sense of judgment and self-reproach? It seems it is never enough to just have a genuine feeling, we must also make ourselves feel terrible for having it. This is the dilemma Tara Brach, PhD brings to light in her book ‘Radical Acceptance; Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha’. Tara Brach is a psychologist and world-renowned Buddhist teacher. The book shares personal stories, stories from her clients and students of meditation that show how desperately we try to avoid acknowledging our true feelings by substituting them with feelings of unworthiness and self-doubt. Most of us are hard on ourselves in general and particularly when it comes to experiencing the deeper and more uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger, grief and sadness (or whatever seems to be your fall-back emotion). In her book, Ms. Brach brings to light the ways we sabotage ourselves from healing our feelings by turning them on ourselves, and then provides techniques and teachings to help us stay present to the suffering. It may sound like “acceptance” means “surrender” but it hardly does. She gives us genuine ways to meet our feelings and even our trauma with grace and compassion, without avoiding it, without turning it on ourselves, and without perpetuating the pain any further. The beauty of this book is that it is universal. We are all touched by suffering and long for the tools to move through pain into peace and contentment. While we can’t ever really avoid the difficulties life brings, we can learn to meet them with gentleness; gentleness to the feelings that arise, and of course, to ourselves. If you are looking for ways to begin the journey towards healing difficult emotions AND towards self-acceptance, you can be sure you’ll find solace in ‘Radical Acceptance.’