Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

Front Cover
Random House Publishing Group, Nov 23, 2004 - Religion - 384 pages
In our current times of global crises and spiking collective anxiety, Tara Brach’s transformative practice of Radical Acceptance offers a pathway to inner freedom and a more compassionate world.

This classic work now features an insightful new introduction, an exclusive bonus chapter, and additional guided meditations.

Radical Acceptance offers us an invitation to embrace ourselves with all our pain, fear, and anxieties, and to step lightly yet firmly on the path of understanding and compassion.”Thich Nhat Hanh
 
“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork—all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s forty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.
 
Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she shows us how we can stop being at war with ourselves and begin to live fully every precious moment of our lives.
 

Contents

ONE The Trance of Unworthiness
3
ONE Recognizing the Trance of Unworthiness
20
The Path
22
TWO The Practice of Vipassana Mindfulness
43
Resting Under
46
The Spirit
69
FOUR The Power of Yes
82
The Ground
88
Becoming
190
EIGHT Becoming the Holder of Suffering
209
An Applied Meditation
213
NINE The Practice of RAIN
235
TEN Tonglen Awakening the Heart
261
The Gateway
264
ELEVEN Cultivating a Forgiving Heart
293
Practicing Radical Acceptance
302

FIVE Developing an Embodied Presence
117
Awakening to
122
SIX Not Doing When We Feel Driven
150
SEVEN Opening Our Heart in the Face of Fear
154
SEVEN Meeting Fear with an Open
187
TWELVE Communicating with Awareness
322
THIRTEEN Realizing Our True Nature
325
THIRTEEN Who Am I?
343
RAIN Partners Practicing with Others
347
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About the author (2004)

Tara Brach, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist as well as a Buddhist lay priest and popular teacher of mindfulness (vipassana) meditation. She is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, D.C., and has conducted workshops at Spirit Rock Center, Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, and other retreat centers nationwide. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her teenaged son.

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