LIFE = Broken, Messy, Mysterious, & Vibrantly Alive

Radical Acceptance: It’s harder than you may think!

I’m in the midst of reading the book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach, and the truths in the book have moved me closer to behaviors and actions that reflect my authentic self. A colossal claim for a piece of non-fiction I know, but… read on.

Brach’s message: “to embrace life in all its realness- broken, messy, mysterious, and vibrantly alive” is something many of us don’t do because we are too busy hiding from the pain.

Who wants to embrace a messy, broken mysterious beast with body odor and halitosis? Sounds like a dragon from the days of yore to me, and people in the myths ran like hell from those fire-breathing menaces. But embrace flaws and scars we must if healing is to begin.

Brach quotes Carl Jung when he describes what happens when women and men run from the ogres in our origins who will never stop chasing us through the terrain of unstable intellect. It’s clear: “The unfaced and unfelt parts of our psyche are the source of all neurosis and suffering.”

Right on Carl Jung!

Denying our pain- and what Brach calls human rawness- leads us to put our lives, minds, hearts, bodies and spirits on automatic. We enter a trance-like state to protect the rawness of our hearts from being judged as pathetic and feeble. We defend ourselves against the doubts and demons in our minds because others might call us crazy. Unexamined and unrevealed fears are in control of our lives.

Facing and feeling the fear and shame awakens us from the trance and is the pathway to healing. “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something that wants our love,” poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds Buddhists who work hard each day to reveal more and more of their authentic selves.

Be prepared as you read this book: You may just recognize a few of your own habitual behaviors sticking their tongues out at you mockingly. When Brach reminds us that it’s time to “open up new and creative ways of responding to our hopes and fears,” listening to her professional advice leads us to a small slice of enlightenment pie and that's yummy.

I was a bit horrified and humbled to see myself lost in what Brach describes as pursuing substitutes because she writes that, “when we can’t meet our emotional needs directly, the wanting self develops strategies for satisfying them with substitutes. Like all strategies underlying the trance of unworthiness, those aimed at winning love and respect absorb and fixate our attention.”

Like Brach, my drive to be productive is a strategy for pursuing substitutes that my wanting self uses to gain approval and to demonstrate to the world that I am worthy of love and respect. For example, I will be in a trance-like state when I want to produce something to prove my human value: clean the kitchen until it sparkles like diamonds; write a hugely popular article that will win me accolades; exercise until my buns are like steel… and the list doesn’t stop.

In the past, I would push myself to excel so I could feel accepted and admired by my community members. In the process of producing, I would overlook personal relationships in the race for professional accomplishments that never made me feel whole or happy. I never felt content, calm or satisfied with my accomplishments because I had to wake up every morning anxious about what needed to be produced on that day. I couldn’t stop the demented dance. I had substituted accomplishments for my real, authentic self. I was strangling the voice of my deepest self because I was insecure, afraid of rejection, and not listening to the messy, broken song of my life. What a horrible, self-destructive pattern I had fallen into in my quest for validation and approval from those around me.

Brach quotes D.H. Lawrence who wrote: “Men [and women] are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men [and women] are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.”

By hiding from my deepest self, I made myself insecure, melancholic and neurotic. I was going nowhere on the path to Nirvana until I realized it was time to forgive myself, show some self-compassion, and let my deepest self articulate her "I Have a Dream" speech.

My accomplishments are not me!

Let me stop here because I don’t want to reveal everything this book has to offer. Moving closer to our inner selves is a life-long task that involves self-discipline and the courage to confront our inner demons, something I do when I mentally process the content of Brach's writing.

If you are ready to slay dragons, I recommend you read Tara Brach’s book.