Radical acceptance book review
i swear reading books solve all of my problems
Once in a while I read a book that fundamentally shifts how I view the world. I’m starting 2024 strong because I just finished exactly one of those - Radical Acceptance (RA) by Tara Branch.
I first heard about RA on Tim Ferriss' podcast. The title sounds voodoo-ish but I thought, it might be relevant to me, i have a 50-book challenge on Goodreads, might as well give it a try. Then I read the following paragraph in the Forewords:
[A meditation student was with her mom as she was dying, where she was drifting in and out of consciousness].
One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. “You know,” she whispered softly, “all my life I thought something was wrong with me. […] What a waste.”
and something inside of me broke - I knew I had to read it.
*
A bit of a back story: I spent the latter half of 2023 with lots of, hmm, self-inflicting pain? Like, judging myself when a joke doesn’t land, being critical when i failed to meet someone’s expectations, or doubting myself of all my unrealized goals. And all of this when my life was going, not bad? I have a great job, an apartment in the best city in the world, and a great community all around. Sure, i still have things to figure out, but not anything major enough to match with the clouds over my head. Outwardly I was functional, inwardly I was not feeling so great.
And then I read RA.
Several year ago, [when Dalai Lama visited] … an American Vipassana teacher asked him to talk about the suffering of self-hatred. A look of confusion came over the Dalai Lama’s face. “What is self-hatred?” he asked … How could they feel that way about themselves, he wondered, when “everybody has Buddha nature.”
As I read this I wondered, what is it like to live that way?
*
[Buddha’s] amazing insight was that all suffering or dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken understanding that we are a separate and distinct self. … We interpret everything we think & feel, and everything that happens to us, as in some way belonging to or caused by a self.
[…] When we take life personally, the universal sense that “something is wrong” easily solidifies into “something is wrong with me“.
So much of our suffering is caused by our own narrative, our personal drama. An example that illustrates the point: in the last 2 years I had so many visa issues, maybe once every four months. It happened so often that I started genuinely questioning, Am I secretly a bad person? Is that why the universe is punishing me? But each time, things worked out, I got to where I needed to go. But it took a while before I could tell myself, it was something that happened, not a reflection of who I was.
It sounds silly retelling it now, but if we think about it, how much of our suffering comes from our own narratives? That the date did not work out because we are unworthy, that people leave because we don’t provide enough values, that we failed someone because we are evil. How much of it is things happening, vs things happening to us?
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So here’s the first tool: instead of feeling something is wrong with us, just recognize what is happening, without trying to pull away, without labelling it as good or bad. That is mindfulness.
A story from the book that illustrates this: A man arrived at a meditation retreat who had Alzheimer’s. He has been meditating for over 20 years, but he was aware of how his mind was deteriorating. He would forget words often and would forget to do basic tasks, like putting on clothes in the morning. But he was calm, graceful, and good-humored towards his disease. When asked how he could be so accepting, he responded: “It doesn’t feel like anything is wrong. I feel grief and some fear, but it feels like real life.”
He went on to tell the story of him giving a speech about his experience and resilience facing Alzheimer’s, but as he got on stage, he suddenly blanked out. He completely forgot why he was there and what he was going to talk about. As his heart was racing, he closed his eyes and started naming all the emotions he felt: “Afraid, embarrassed, confused, feeling like I’m failing, powerless,…”
As the minutes passed, he continued naming every emotion. When his mind started feeling calmer, he noted that aloud too. Eventually, he opened his eyes and apologized.
The crowd was in stunned silence. Many were in tears. Instead of pushing away his experience, he bowed to it. He felt grief and confusion and even anger, but he didn’t make anything wrong. He saw the feelings arise and instead of pushing them away, he greeted them with kindness.
Nothing is wrong - it is just real life.
*
Real life, what is that like?
After reading this chapter, I sat down and started doing a body scan. It’s a meditation practice where you go through your body and notice any sensation that arises. I closed my eyes and immediately noticed the self-inflicting spots. My head felt heavy. My shoulders were tightening. There was slight pain like ant bites all over my body. Whenever I felt this in the past, my default was getting frustrated because I was not meditating the right way. But this time, I just whispered to myself, “It must hurt a lot.” “It must be tiring.” “It must be hard.” over and over.
I’m flying in my head all the time. My feet are rarely, touching grass, as the kids call these days. And so i tell myself story and i believe them. Like, it’s not supposed to be hard, i am supposed to figure things out at this point, i should not wallow in my sadness, i should figure it out now. But in just acknowledging exactly what i feel, and that it is ok to feel this way, the knots in my body were loosening. I was not criticizing myself, i was not telling myself story, i was simply saying, as if to a child that is crying, “It must hurt a lot.” I let myself feel the burdens of the heart. Somehow, that opens a tenderness in myself that I keep forgetting exists. I open myself up to the real world that is.
this beautiful writing comes to me at such a right time <3 can't wait to read more from you!