Radical Acceptance

Someone must have recommended Tara Brach's first book a long time ago, because it had been sitting in my to read list for quite a while.  In the meantime, I've read a couple of other books that belong in the same "IMS dharma" genre as this one.  They're all an easy-reading combination of modern takes on core Buddhist principles, lightened with a mix of personal anecdote and case stories drawn from the author's teaching experience.  While I've enjoyed them all, I found Brach's book the most affecting of the ones I've read.  

She frames the goal of practice as awakening from a "trance of unworthiness", a deep and often subconscious feeling that it is somehow simply not okay to be the way we are.  The idea that nothing is a problem, that everything is okay being the way it is, might sound like a simplistic reiteration of the vapid teachings of Dr. Pangloss.  Once we move beyond the facile misinterpretations to which this idea is prone though, we see that it's not a question of trying (futilely) to avoid acting or changing anything, but a question of becoming intimate with our experience, becoming capable of seeing all of it, excluding none of it.  In other words, the opposite of radical acceptance isn't activity but simply ignorance -- we ignore our experience.  Accordingly, Brach structures her book as a progressive investigation of the things we usually like to ignore.  Our feeling of unworthiness, our body, our desire, our fear -- these are all experiences we thirst to make disappear as quickly as possible because we see them as problems to be solved and states to be avoided.  We just want to make them stop.  If, instead of struggling to alter these feelings, we pause to embrace them, however counterintuitive this may sound, we can gradually find that these states begin to lose some of their reactive power over us.  They may even stop on their own.  Or they may not.  The goal really isn't to control of optimize our experience, but to experience it.  Thus, Brach builds towards the Dzogchen idea that all experience is part of the one thing that can't ignore -- awareness. 

P.S. I cried when her dog died.