Radical acceptance of the good, and the not so good

Tara Brach lays out a way to deal with painful feelings, and to live life more fully. Her book Radical Acceptance, Embracing Your Life with the Heart of A Buddha, lays out her thinking.

Tara Brach is a clinical psychologist, meaning she practices psychotherapy. She's also a student of Buddhism, including mindfulness meditation. She has a lot to contribute to mindful psychotherapy.

The idea here is to embrace all of life, the good, the bad, and the boring. Want to eliminate suffering in your life? Forget it. Want to only experience joy? Forget it.   The way of mindfulness is to be with all experience, not to chase it away, even if it is unpleasant. It just takes too much energy to chase away experience. Avoiding knowing experience is a little like living in delusion.

The book's title, Radical Acceptance, comes from the idea that it's radical to accept negative experience, radical because in this society we're brought up to minimize the bad and maximize the good. It really is radical to say that when we're experiencing something unpleasant, we should allow ourselves to 'be' fully in that experience.  This doesn't mean going out looking for unpleasant experience; just being with it when it comes.  Why practice this radical acceptance?  Because it works.

The Buddha was raised in luxury, his father a King, yet he wasn't happy. He wanted to find enlightenment, and like many Hindus of his day began by depriving himself of all comfort: nearly starving himself, living the life of a homeless person. That didn't work either, he nearly died, not at all the better of having lived in suffering.  Living in luxury hadn't worked; living in suffering hadn't worked, either.   He struggled to make sense of life, finally resolving to sit under the Boddhi tree until he understood things more deeply.  He realized the idea of embracing whatever experience came to him, the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the neutral (boring).  Life always included elements of happiness and elements of sadness. Enlightenment meant accepting all of experience,  even as a child does, without preference.

This is a rather large teaching moment in Buddhism, and also for Tara Brach. She sees how we lead so much of our lives trying to avoid pain and suffering, seeking after comfort, to no avail. The difficulties just keep on coming.

The change she teaches involves accepting all of experience, as the Buddha did.

It plays out like this: The prime dissatisfaction for many of us is the sense that we are unworthy. We aren't enough, we don't do enough, we don't have enough.  We live in a trance of unworthiness. It's a trance because the pain of KNOWING the unworthy feelings is rather deep. So we keep really busy, so there's no time to sit and feel. We embark on self-improvement projects to try to be good enough. We avoid risks to avoid more pain. We withdraw from knowing our current experience.  We become self-critics. And like most self critics, we also become critical of others.  Doing all this activity just to live in the delusion that everything should be pleasant. And to avoid knowing what's life is really like.

Being caught in the trance  means losing sight of the self who's connected, whole, in the 'fullness of being.' Breaking the trance of unworthiness involves being in close touch with the self that's fearful, wanting, feeling alone and separate.

Brach's way out?  "When we learn to face and feel the fear and shame we habitually avoid, we begin to awaken from the trance." (p. 57)

A principal way for the beginner to do this is with the sacred pause. It's a way to stop running from experience. Brach lays out in clear detail how to learn the sacred pause, although for many it is better learned with the aid of a professional helper, as the feelings that come out can be strong.  The sacred pause is sort of like saying, "Here I am, (name your experience)... let me feel it fully, let me be with it, regardless of how I feel about it."

Having learned the pause, readers are encouraged to practice it often. The book introduces vipassana or mindfulness meditation to come into contact with experience, and metta or loving-kindness meditation to develop compassion for the deeper self that comes clearly into view.

People of all walks of life can gain from this book. Each chapter ends with the text of a guided meditation to practice and directly experience her teachings.

For professionals: In the process of describing Radical Acceptance Brach lays out an approach to mindful therapy that reveals itself only through the accumulation of examples she uses. But revealing it is, and worthy of study by the psychotherapist.  For the professional psychotherapist who wants to learn more, Dr. Brach has also taught workshops on Radical Acceptance for professionals. I studied this with her, and found it most helpful.  With some of my psychotherapy clients it becomes the focus of our work.

A helpful interview with Tara Brach occured in Elisha Goldstein's blog at PsychCenral, 9/4/09.