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

by Tara Brach (Author), Jack Kornfield (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
A psychotherapist and Buddhist meditation teacher in the tradition of Jack Kornfield (who contributes a foreword), first-time author Brach offers readers a rich compendium of stories and techniques designed to help people awaken from what she calls "the trance of unworthiness." The sense of self-hatred and fearful isolation that afflicts so many people in the West can be transformed with the steady application of a loving attention infused with the insights of the Buddhist tradition, according to Brach. Interweaving stories from her own life as a hardworking single mother with many wonderful anecdotes culled from her therapy practice and her work as a leader of meditation retreats, Brach offers myriad examples of how our pain can become a doorway to love and liberation. An older Catholic woman in one of Brach's weekend workshops, for example, recounts how she learned to ask God to help hold her pain. Like her colleagues Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein and others in the Vipassana or Insight meditation tradition, Brach is open-minded about where she gathers inspiration. Garnishing her gentle advice and guided meditation with beautiful bits of poetry and well-loved if familiar dharma stories, Brach describes what it can mean to open to the reality of other people, to live in love, to belong to the world. Obviously the fruit of the author's own long and honest search, this is a consoling and practical guide that can help people find a light within themselves.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Radical Acceptance offers gentle wisdom and tender healing, a most excellent medicine for our unworthiness and longing. Breathe, soften, and let these compassionate teachings bless your heart."
? Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
-- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (June 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553801678
• ISBN-13: 978-0553801675
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,993 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A truly amazing book that will change your life, November 18, 2003

By	Thomas Hochmann (Albuquerque, NM) - See all my reviews

I've read a number of books on Buddhism, and many of them include a fair amount of discussion on "suffering" and how much of our pain is perpetuated by our telling stories to ourselves. The mind (and heart) is seemingly forever tangled in a web of doubt, what-ifs, and events that exist mostly or entirely in one's head. As Mark Twain put it, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened."

That, in essence, is what /Radical Acceptance/ is about, but it goes above and beyond the seemingly brief gloss-over treatment traditional western Buddhist books give this subject. Tara Brach has crafted an amazing book that opens your eyes to just how much suffering we tend to bring upon ourselves. Despite the very serious nature of what this book deals with, it is a delight to read. With each turn of the page, you begin to see more and more clearly. It's like having a compassionate, age-old friend guide you down the road of your own emotions and thoughts.

If you take the time to truly digest what /Radical Acceptance/ is all about, I can guarantee it will change you forever. My brief description here cannot do it justice by any measure - just as the storytelling and strategizing of the mind cannot do justice to the vibrant reality of the world. You might think a book about suffering and self-delusion would be depressing, but it is entirely the opposite. It's like suddenly being able to see with clarity after being caught up in a dense fog for so long. And that, I believe, is the highest praise you can give any book.

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book with heart, July 1, 2003

By	Hugh Byrne (Silver Spring, MD United States) - See all my reviews

'A book with heart.'

In the 25 centuries since the Buddha's enlightenment under the tree in northern India, his teachings have taken on unique expressions as they spread from India and throughout Asia. The core of the teachings kept their integrity and directness, but the forms and expressions they took both helped shape and were shaped by the cultures and pre-existing traditions in these countries.

As the Buddha's teachings have spread to the West-particularly in the last two generations-a similarly fascinating encounter is at work. Westerners have the opportunity to read, explore, and practice in a variety of Buddhist traditions-Tibetan, Zen, Insight meditation and others. At the same time, Buddhism in the West is being shaped by our own social, political, cultural, and scientific history of recent centuries-so already Buddhism here looks less monastic, more gender equal, more focused on the inner search for truth than on external rites and rituals, and more agnostic on questions that are not so easily testable by our own direct experience, e.g., reincarnation.

The spiritual marketplace is rich with the extraordinary contributions of Westerners who have spent extensive time in Asia studying with teachers there and coming back to share their wisdom-Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Christopher Titmuss, to name just some of those teaching in the Insight meditation tradition. They have all succeeded in taking these perennial wisdom teachings and expressing them in a language that is accessible to Westerners from many walks of life and spiritual backgrounds.

Tara Brach's `Radical Acceptance: Embracing your Life with the Heart of a Buddha' is a wonderful continuation of this still-new encounter. As a Buddhist meditation teacher and a psychotherapist, Brach is well placed to bring the wisdom and compassion of Buddhist teachings together with the insights and understandings of psychotherapy. But this is not a slam-dunk. Ancient wisdom teachings mixed with Western therapeutic approaches can come out as New Age pablum. Brach succeeds by staying true to the Buddha's statement: "I teach one thing and one thing alone: suffering and its end.' She finds much of our suffering in the West in our own lack of worth or worthiness and sees that happiness, contentment, and awakening must come through a full and loving acceptance of who we are-rather than trying to escape from, avoid, or transcend our fears, desire, and longings.

`Radical Acceptance' is a book full of heart, full of the desire for all of us, all beings, to realize our true potential, our true nature, our Buddha nature. It is replete with stories from Brach's own experience that do not put her on a pedestal-`the teacher: be like her'-but say clearly that these fears, this lust, this anger, greed, the pleasant and unpleasant emotions and states of mind... are in our natures as humans, and happiness and ultimate freedom come through accepting and embracing them and seeing that they are not `me' or `mine.'

`Radical Acceptance' is a deeply kind and generous contribution to a suffering world. Truly a book with heart.

256 of 291 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great book on mindfulness, but limited in other ways, February 24, 2004

By A Customer

Tara Brach is a great teacher of psychology and an especially brilliant teacher of mindfulness, but I think her teachings of Buddhism are reductionist when it comes to their fundamental core.

I concur with what many of the reviewers have said below about how well Tara Brach brings the Buddhist teachings on awareness and compassion to light. This book is particularly valuable for those who are interested in Buddhism as a collection of practical, secular techniques to improve personal well-being and social relationships. It is "accessible", "practical" and "heart-warming". In this sense Tara Brach is a master of human psychology.

However, those who are interested in seeing what the Buddha saw (which is a possiblity for all), in living in such a way that it is no longer necessary to cultivate joy but merely have bliss follow one like a shadow, in realizing the formless compassion of the Buddhas which is beyond the limited techniques of psychology, should question some of the assertions in this book.

The primary notion Tara Brach emphasizes which, while believable from a psychological perspective, is highly questionable from a Buddhist perspective, is the notion that "awareness is the true self" or "compassion is the true self". Tara Brach describes the true self as something one knows when one has the clear mind of meditation (whether seated or in daily life) or a compassionate heart, but doesn't know when one gets distracted or angry or self-doubting. In one passage, she describes being her true self one morning, getting distracted, and then losing touch with her true self. This makes it sound like the "true self" is some separate state, which is then defined with terms like awareness and compassion.

There are many different interpretations of Buddhism and there is no way to objectively to say which is 'right' or 'authentic', but the view that the true self is something which comes in one state of mind and leaves in another is highly suspect. The "true self" in Buddhism, to the extent that one wishes to use such terminology, is altogether everywhere, without differentiation or degree. It neither comes nor goes nor sits nor reclines. One does not need to do any practice or be in any state to realize it; it cannot be with you sometimes and not with you other times. It depends on no state of mind, no practice, no virtue - it is unconditioned.

All conditioned things (which includes the elements that we humans often mistakenly think we are such as our personalities or our virtues or our values or some profound mental/emotional state we come to) are intrinsically Nirvanic. In other words, confusion and anger are no less our "true self" than "awareness".

Read this book, love it, cherish it, and learn from it, but ask yourself whether the real cessation of suffering the Buddha knew is some state of "awareness" or "compassion", something that is here when you are clear minded and gone when you are not. I don't think that's what the Buddha taught.

But you can read the Majjhima Nikaya, available at Amazon, (Suttas 7, 10, 22, 26 are particularly relevant to this question) and find out for yourself.

Awareness and compassion are very important, but the Buddha did not mistake them for a "true self". The Buddha rode on a raft of such positive states, such good karma, to cross to the other shore, but when he got there, he abandoned even them, he knew what was before and after them and what illuminates them beyond any faculty, and that is what allowed him to save thousands of beings with merely a word or a smile or a gesture.

I think Tara Brach has written a brilliant book, but she could have improved it by staying within the limits of her own insight, not diminshing Buddhism with the confines of psychology. This books shows the limits of trying to express Buddhism with Western science and humanism, in other words of thinking the truths of Buddhism can be mastered without a shift in one's fundamental world view.