Embracing Your Life with the Heart of the Buddha
Tara Brach, Ph.D.
2003
Bio
Interview
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What Tara Brach terms “radical acceptance” is the fundamental basis for any quest for self-understanding, and also the first requirement for loving others. Of course this is not a new idea—we all know we need to have self-love and self-esteem, and there are hundreds of other books and magazine articles that say so. This is also a crucial piece of the influence of the mind and the emotions on our physical health. What is not always so clear is what real self-love and self-esteem look like, to us, here and now in this moment, or how to achieve them. She unpacks the concept in a beautiful way, relating many personal experiences, stories of clients and students, and quotations from other disciplines, so that it is easy to connect with and understand. 

Brach cuts immediately to the heart of the problem when she describes “the trance of unworthiness”—that waking dream in which ultimately we can’t do anything right -- no matter what we achieve, we know that we are fundamentally worthless, and our life is a string of stories of the fears and anxieties provoked by that knowledge and our need to hide it from others. The concept of self-hatred, so universal today, appears to be alien to traditional Buddhism. She reports a surprising interview with the Dalai Lama in which he was simply unable to comprehend the state of mind that American meditation teachers were describing. 

She uses the Buddhist Vipassana teaching of focusing mindful attention to experience the sensations of the body, and rather than interrupting and constricting them by holding on to them or resisting them, learning to let them flow, unfold, and transform. In this way, the suffering of fears and anxieties, pain and grief, can pass through instead of clogging up the works. It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to the experience. In a practical sense, this is like a sensation-based supplement/alternative to Cognitive Therapy, which teaches how to let go of negative thoughts and therefore emotions by rationally disputing them.