The key ideas

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

Tara Brach, 2003

Do you know the feeling that something is wrong with you, so you have to try even harder? Tara Brach calls it the trance of unworthiness and shows how it quietly eats away at a life. She brings together her work as a psychologist, Buddhist stories and the experiences of her students. You will learn how to pause, meet a hard feeling with kindness and stop hiding who you are.

Who it is for

For anyone who is always judging themselves and is never quite satisfied. And for anyone tired of fighting their own feelings who wants to learn to meet them without shame.

What would it be like if I could accept life, accept this moment, exactly as it is?

“All my life I thought something was wrong with me”

A student of Tara Brach named Marilyn sat at the bedside of her dying mother. Her mother had already slipped into a coma. But shortly before the end, she opened her eyes, looked at her daughter and said: “All my life I thought something was wrong with me.” Then she added: “What a waste!” Those were her last words.

Tara Brach is an American clinical psychologist and a teacher of Buddhist meditation. In 1998 she founded a Vipassana meditation community in Washington, and in 2003 she published this book, her first. Her question is simple and heavy: why do so many people live like Marilyn's mother, quietly convinced that they are somehow not right, and how do we get out of it?

Brach's answer comes in two parts. First she gives this state a name, the trance of unworthiness, and shows how it works. Then she offers a way out, which she calls radical acceptance: seeing clearly what is happening inside you and meeting what you see with kindness. The word “radical” comes from the Latin word for “root”. Here it means acceptance all the way down to the root, including the parts of yourself you would rather hide.

You will learn what the trance looks like from the inside and what it takes from you. You will learn why Brach recalls a pilot who survived because he blacked out; how the Buddha invited his tempter to tea; and what a man with Alzheimer's disease did when, in front of a hundred people, he forgot where he was. And at the end you will get a four-step practice for your hardest moments.

A dream that feels like waking life

Brach describes the trance of unworthiness through the image of a recurring dream. In the dream you are always rushing, trying, struggling, yet you never quite make it, and you know in advance that you will fail. It is hard to wake up, because the dream feels like life itself. The trance works the same way: “something is wrong with me” does not sound like a thought, it sounds like the truth about you.

From the inside it feels like constant surveillance. Did I say something I shouldn't have? Have I done enough? How does this look to other people? Even success does not help for long. The joy of getting something done soon gives way to a new list of things that still need fixing.

Brach tells this about herself, too. After college she spent about ten years in an ashram, a community where people live together and practise yoga and meditation for many hours a day. The practice was strict, and life ran by rules. And yet, she says, the trance did not disappear there either: she kept watching herself and judging herself, only now spiritual practice was the yardstick.

This is the central mistake the book exposes. We assume the trance can be cured by trying even harder: a new system, a new goal, one more project to fix ourselves. But if all of it comes from the feeling that something is wrong with me, every effort only confirms the verdict. The dream simply changes its scenery.

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About the author

Tara Brach is an American clinical psychologist and meditation teacher, and the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. She is the author of Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion and other books.

All books by this author: Tara Brach

Terms from the book

  • Marilyn
  • Mindfulness
  • Mara
  • meditation
  • Buddha
  • Dharma
  • Compassion
  • Alzheimer's
  • Ashram
  • RAIN
  • Vipassana: Buddhist insight meditation, in which you closely watch what is happening in the body and mind. Brach teaches in this tradition.
  • Radical Acceptance: The author's term: seeing clearly what is happening inside you and holding what you see with kindness. It is an image from the book, not a scientific concept.
  • Trance of unworthiness: An image from the book, not a diagnosis: the habitual belief that something is wrong with me, which feels like the truth about who I am.
  • Yeager: Chuck Yeager (1923 to 2020), an American military test pilot. In 1947 he officially became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
  • Sacred pause: The author's term: a brief stop in which you set aside, for a moment, whatever goal you are chasing and simply notice what is happening.
  • Retreat: A stretch of time set apart for meditation: usually several days, often in silence, on a strict schedule.
  • Jacob: A participant in a meditation retreat, a clinical psychologist with Alzheimer's disease. Brach tells his story in the book.
  • Non-identification: The last step of RAIN in the 2003 book: seeing that a feeling is something you experience, not who you are.
  • Buddha nature: The Buddhist idea that at the core of every person lies the capacity to be aware and to love.

All terms

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