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Radical Acceptance

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Radical Acceptance

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When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.

Inherent in the trance is the belief that no matter how hard we try, we are always, in some way, falling short.

Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It’s a vicious cycle: The more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel. Underneath our fear of being flawed is a more primal fear that something is wrong with life, that something bad is going to happen. Our reaction to this fear is to feel blame, even hatred, toward whatever we consider the source of the problem: ourselves, others, life itself. But even when we have directed our aversion outward, deep down we still feel vulnerable.

What I brought to my spiritual path included all my needs to be admired, all my insecurities about not being good enough, all my tendencies to judge my inner and outer world. The playing field was larger than my earlier pursuits, but the game was still the same: striving to be a different and better person.

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.”

Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.

Our imperfect parents had imperfect parents of their own. Fears, insecurities and desires get passed along for generations. Parents want to see their offspring make it in ways that are important to them. Or they want their children to be special, which in our competitive culture means more intelligent, accomplished and attractive than other people. They see their children through filters of fear (they might not get into a good college and be successful) and filters of desire (will they reflect well on us?).

But even in less extreme situations, most of us learn that our desires, fears and views don’t carry much weight, and that we need to be different and better if we are to belong.

Living in the future creates the illusion that we are managing our life and steels us against personal failure.

This was his first noble truth: Suffering or discontent is universal, and fully recognizing its existence is the first step on the path of awakening.

all suffering or dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken understanding that we are a separate and distinct self.

What we experience as the “self” is an aggregate of familiar thoughts, emotions and patterns of behavior. The mind binds these together, creating a story about a personal, individual entity that has continuity through time. Everything we experience is subsumed into this story of self and becomes my experience.

Our most habitual and compelling feelings and thoughts define the core of who we think we are. If we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we experience that core as flawed.

Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution’s design to protect us and help us to thrive. But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being.

Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being “without anxiety about imperfection.” This means accepting our human existence and all of life as it is. Imperfection is not our personal problem—it is a natural part of existing.

Although the trance of feeling separate and unworthy is an inherent part of our conditioning as humans, so too is our capacity to awaken. We free ourselves from the prison of trance as we stop the war against ourselves and, instead, learn to relate to our lives with a wise and compassionate heart.

Often we perceive the trance most clearly by recognizing how we want others to see us—and what we don’t want them to see. Bring to mind someone you’ve spent time with recently—someone you like and respect but don’t know well. What do you most want this person to see about you (e.g., that you are loving, generous, attractive)? What do you not want this person to perceive about you (e.g., that you are selfish, insecure, jealous)?

As you go through your day, pause occasionally to ask yourself, “This moment, do I accept myself just as I am?” Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.

Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Carl Rogers

The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.

When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment.

Our enjoyment is tainted by anxiety about keeping what we have and our compulsion to reach out and get more.

The two parts of genuine acceptance—seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion—are as interdependent as the two wings of a great bird. Together, they enable us to fly and be free.

We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.

The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening. The very nature of our heart is to care.

Radical Acceptance means bringing a clear, kind attention to our capacities and limitations without giving our fear-based stories the power to shut down our lives.

In accepting the waves of thought and feeling that arise and pass away, we realize our deepest nature, our original nature, as a boundless sea of wakefulness and love.

I recognized my aversion to physical discomfort, to feeling fear and loneliness.

There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

The particular sensations, emotions or thoughts that arise when we practice mindfulness are not so important. It is our willingness to become still and pay attention to our experience, whatever it may be, that plants the seeds of Radical Acceptance.

Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here.   This opening to the life we have refused again and again until now.   Until now. David Whyte

A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal.

A pause is, by nature, time limited. We resume our activities, but we do so with increased presence and more ability to make choices.

When we pause, we don’t know what will happen next. But by disrupting our habitual behaviors, we open to the possibility of new and creative ways of responding to our wants and fears.

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us.

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.

Our own personal shadow is made up of those parts of our being that we experience as unacceptable. Our families and culture let us know early on which qualities of human nature are valued and which are frowned upon. Because we want to be accepted and loved, we try to fashion and present a self that will attract others and secure our belonging. But we inevitably express our natural aggression or neediness or fear—parts of our emotional makeup that frequently are taboo—and the significant people in our life react to us. Whether we are mildly scolded, ignored or traumatically rejected, on some level we are hurt and pushed away.

As we strive to avoid the shadow, we solidify our identity as a fearful, deficient self.

Any of us, when our particular place of insecurity or woundedness is touched, easily regress into the fullness of trance. At these times there seems to be no choice as to what we feel, think, say or do. Rather, we “go on automatic,” reacting in our most habitual way to defend ourselves, to cover over the rawness of our hurt.

As happens in any addiction, the behaviors we use to keep us from pain only fuel our suffering. Not only do our escape strategies amplify the feeling that something is wrong with us, they stop us from attending to the very parts of ourselves that most need our attention to heal.

When we learn to face and feel the fear and shame we habitually avoid, we begin to awaken from trance. We free ourselves to respond to our circumstances in ways that bring genuine peace and happiness.

In the flow and sacred mystery of life, there was room for the immensity of joy and sorrow. He felt completely at peace.

Until we stop our mental busyness, stop our endless activities, we have no way of knowing our actual experience.

We can choose to pause on the top of a mountain or in a subway, while we are with others or meditating alone.

We touch the freedom that is possible in any moment when we are not grasping after our experience or resisting it.

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.   A joy, a depression, a meanness, Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.   Welcome and entertain them all! …   The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.   Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Rumi

We practice Radical Acceptance by pausing and then meeting whatever is happening inside us with this kind of unconditional friendliness. Instead of turning our jealous thoughts or angry feelings into the enemy, we pay attention in a way that enables us to recognize and touch any experience with care. Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.” Such unconditional friendliness is the spirit of Radical Acceptance.

we need to deepen our attention and touch our real experience. One tool of mindfulness that can cut through our numbing trance is inquiry. As we ask ourselves questions about our experience, our attention gets engaged. We might begin by scanning our body, noticing what we are feeling, especially in the throat, chest, abdomen and stomach, and then asking, “What is happening?” We might also ask, “What wants my attention right now?” or, “What is asking for acceptance?” Then we attend, with genuine interest and care, listening to our heart, body and mind.

Recognizing that we are suffering is freeing—self-judgment falls away and we can regard ourselves with kindness.

When we offer to ourselves the same quality of unconditional friendliness that we would offer to a friend, we stop denying our suffering.

We bring alive the spirit of Radical Acceptance when, instead of resisting emotional pain, we are able to say yes to our experience.

“So walk with your heaviness, saying yes. Yes to the sadness, yes to the whispered longing. Yes to the fear. Love means setting aside walls, fences, and unlocking doors, and saying yes … one can be in paradise by simply saying yes to this moment.” The instant we agree to feel fear or vulnerability, greed or agitation, we are holding our life with an unconditionally friendly heart.

Yes is an inner practice of acceptance in which we willingly allow our thoughts and feelings to naturally arise and pass away.

It’s also easy to mistakenly consider yes as a technique to get rid of unpleasant feelings and make us feel better. Saying yes is not a way of manipulating our experience, but rather an aid to opening to life as it is.

For the time being, saying no to what feels like too much, and yes to what simply works to keep us balanced, is the most compassionate response we can offer ourselves.

There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life. With even a glimmer of that possibility, joy rushes

When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.

There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body. The Buddha, from the Satipatthana Sutta

All our strategies of trying to control life through blaming or withdrawing are aimed at keeping us from the raw experience of just such a moment. In the pause, rather than getting lost in our reactive thoughts and actions, we become directly aware of what is happening in our body. At these times, we begin to see how interconnected our mind and body are. With anger, the body tightens, the chest fills with an explosive feeling of pressure. With fear, we might feel the grip of knots in our stomach, the constriction in our chest or throat. If shame arises, our face burns, our shoulders slump, we feel a physical impulse to shrink back, to hide. Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life.

By inhabiting my body with awareness, I was discovering the roots of my reactivity. I had been avoiding the unpleasant sensations that make up fear and sorrow. By opening mindfully to the play of sensations, the grip of my anger and stories naturally loosened.

We experience our lives through our bodies whether we are aware of it or not. Yet we are usually so mesmerized by our ideas about the world that we miss out on much of our direct sensory experience. Even when we are aware of feeling a strong breeze, the sound of rain on the roof, a fragrance in the air, we rarely remain with the experience long enough to inhabit it fully. In most moments we have an overlay of inner dialogue that comments on what is happening and plans what we might do next. We might greet a friend with a hug, but our moments of physical contact become blurred by our computations about how long to embrace or what we’re going to say when we’re done. We rush through the hug, not fully present.

Because our pleasant or unpleasant sensations so quickly trigger a chain reaction of emotions and mental stories, a central part of our training is to recognize the arising of thoughts and return over and over to our immediate sensory experience.

We practice by seeing the stories, letting them go and dropping under them into the living sensations in our body.

Rather we’re directly experiencing what is happening in our body. Instead of seeing our hand as an external object, for instance, we carefully feel into the energy that is our hand in any given moment. We train to experience the body from the inside out.

Seeing this fluidity in our experience is one of the most profound and distinctive realizations that arise when we become mindful of sensations. We recognize that there is absolutely nothing solid or static about our experience. Rather, the realm of sensations is endlessly changing—sensations appear and vanish, shifting in intensity, texture, location. As we pay close attention to our physical experience, we see that it does not hold still for even a moment. At first this can be uncomfortable, even frightening.

Each time we let go of our story, we realize there is no ground to stand on, no position that orients us, no way to hide or avoid what is arising.

It is easy to feel that something bad will happen if we don’t maintain our habitual vigilance by thinking, judging, planning. Yet this is the very habit that keeps us trapped in resisting life. Only when we realize we can’t hold on to anything can we begin to relax our efforts to control our experience.

Like every aspect of our evolutionary design, the unpleasant sensations we call pain are an intelligent part of our survival equipment: Pain is our body’s call to pay attention, to take care of ourselves.

Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their messages and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

If we accept pain without the confusion of fear, we can listen to its message and respond with clarity.

Pain is the messenger we try to kill, not something we allow and embrace.

But as I learned in childbirth, pain doesn’t have to lead to suffering. The Buddha taught that we suffer when we cling to or resist experience, when we want life different than it is. As the saying goes: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

While there are times in our life we might have had no choice but to contract away from unbearable physical or emotional pain, our healing comes from reconnecting with those places in our body where that pain is stored.

No matter how deeply we have been wounded, when we listen to the inner voice that calls us back to our bodies, back to wholeness, we begin our journey.

Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. If we bring a steady attention to the immediate physical experience of an emotion, past sensations and stories linked to it that have been locked in our body and mind are “de-repressed.” Layers of historic hurt, fear or anger may begin to play themselves out in the light of awareness.

“The cure for the pain is in the pain.”

As we bring a gentle attention to the ground of sensations, we free ourselves from the reactive stories and emotions that have kept us bound in fear. By inhabiting our body with awareness, we reclaim our life and our spirit.

As we let life live through us, we experience the boundless openness of our true nature.

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving. D. H. Lawrence

From the urgent way lovers want each other to the seeker’s search for truth, all moving is from the mover. Every pull draws us to the ocean. Rumi

When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.

Eventually I would find that relating wisely to the powerful and pervasive energy of desire is a pathway into unconditional loving.

It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.

The same life energy that leads to suffering also provides the fuel for profound awakening. Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are.

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing—our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything—a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self—because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

Our sense of self emerges from the ground level of all experience—our reactivity to intense pleasant or unpleasant sensations.

anything.” If we haven’t had to deal with major threats to our physical survival, the wanting self is primarily focused on emotional survival and well-being. We all have, to some degree, experienced fear and shame when our basic needs to feel loved and understood are frustrated.

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.

Our most regularly used strategies to get what we want also become a defining part of our sense of self.

As we immerse ourselves in the life-consuming pursuit of substitutes, we become increasingly alienated from our authentic desires, our deepest longings for love and belonging.

Work becomes an indirect means for trying to win love and respect. We might find what we do entirely meaningless, we might hate or resent our job, yet still hitch our desire for approval and connection to how well we perform.

My love for what I do is clouded over when working becomes a strategy to prove my worth.

We are unable to give ourselves freely and joyfully to any activity if the wanting self is in charge. And yet, until we attend to the basic desires and fears that energize the wanting self, it will insinuate itself into our every activity and relationship.

“Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.”

To listen and respond to the longing of our heart requires a committed and genuine presence. The more completely we’re caught in the surface world of pursuing substitutes, the harder it is to dive.

As Oscar Wilde put it, “I can resist anything but temptation.” Temptation is an emotional promise that we will experience the pleasure we so intensely crave.

As one student described it, “My wanting self is my worst enemy.” When we hate ourselves for wanting, it is because the wanting self has taken over our entire life.

When we reject desire, we reject the very source of our love and aliveness.

In bringing a clear and comprehensive awareness to our situation, we begin to accept our wanting self with compassion. This frees us to move forward, to break out of old patterns.

We suffer when our experience of desire or craving defines and confines our experience of who we are. If we meet the sensations, emotions and thoughts of wanting with Radical Acceptance, we begin to awaken from the identity of a wanting self and to reconnect with the fullness of our being.

“When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.”

A strange passion is moving in my head.   My heart has become a bird     Which searches in the sky. Every part of me goes in different directions.     Is it really so That the one I love is everywhere?

The “one I love” was everywhere, including within me. When we don’t fixate on a single, limited object of love, we discover that the wanting self dissolves into the awareness that is love loving itself.

With Radical Acceptance, we begin to shed the layers of shame and aversion we have built around our “deficient, wanting self.” We see through the stories we have created—stories about a self who is a victim of desire, about a self who is fighting desire, about a self who tumbles into unhealthy desires, about a self who has to have something more, something different from what is right here, right now. Radical Acceptance dissolves the glue that binds us as a small self and frees us to live from the vibrant fullness of our being.

Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging. The more times we traverse this path—feeling the loneliness or craving, and inhabiting its immensity—the more the longing for love becomes a gateway into love itself. Our longings don’t disappear, nor does the need for others. But by opening into the well of desire—again and again—we come to trust the boundless love that is its source.

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us. Charlotte Joko Beck

Young children make sense of abusive experiences by thinking that they caused them to happen, that they were in some way to blame.

If someone gets angry at us, suddenly the dogs are there, threatening to dismantle our world. If we feel rejected or betrayed, the dogs convince us that no one will ever love us.

While all physical and emotional pain is unpleasant, the pain of fear can feel unbearable. When we are gripped by fear, nothing else exists. Our most contracted and painful sense of self is hitched to the feelings and stories of fear, to our ways of resisting fear. Yet this trance begins to lose its power over us as we meet the raw sensations of fear with Radical Acceptance. Such acceptance is profoundly freeing. As we learn to say yes to fear, we reconnect with the fullness of being—the heart and awareness that have been overshadowed by the contraction of fear.

Who doesn’t know the experience of fear? Fear is waking up in the night, like Barbara, terrified that we can’t go on. Fear is the jittery feeling in our stomach, the soreness and pressure around our heart, the strangling tightness in our throat. Fear is the loud pounding of our heart, the racing of our pulse. Fear constricts our breathing, making it rapid and shallow. Fear tells us we are in danger, and then urgently drives our mind to make sense of what is happening and figure out what to do. Fear takes over our mind with stories about what will go wrong. Fear tells us we will lose our body, lose our mind, lose our friends, our family, the earth itself. Fear is the anticipation of future pain.

Only in mammals do cognition and memory interact with affect to create the emotion of fear. Also part of our survival equipment, the emotion of fear is shaped by the accumulated experiences of our personal history. The affect of fear that arises in response to our immediate experience combines with memories of associated past events and the affects they trigger. That’s why some of us are terrified of things that hold no sense of danger for others. While the affect of fear itself lasts but a few seconds, the emotion of fear persists for as long as the affect continues to be stimulated by fearful thoughts and memories.

Regardless of the external circumstances my mind grows tight. When I pause and ask what is really bothering me, I realize that in each situation I am anticipating loss—loss of something I think is essential to my life and happiness.

The ultimate loss—the one underlying all those smaller losses I’m afraid of—is loss of life itself. The root of all our fear is our basic craving for existence and aversion to deterioration and death. We are always facing death in some form or other.

This fear of separation from the life I love—the fear of death—lies beneath all other fears.

Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seems to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.

The first step in finding a basic sense of safety is to discover our connectedness with others. As we begin to trust the reality of belonging, the stranglehold of fear loosens its grip.

In facing intense fear,we need to be reminded that we are part of something larger than our own frightened self.

Taking refuge transforms our relationship with fear. When we feel the safety of belonging, we can begin to meet fear with Radical Acceptance.

Being mindful of fear requires being both open and awake.

If we don’t remain awake, spaciousness can become spacing out. We can seek openness as a way of avoiding fear rather than meeting it with mindfulness.

When we relate to fear rather than from fear, our sense of who we are begins to shift. Instead of being a tense and embattled self, we reconnect with our naturally spacious awareness. Instead of being trapped in and defined by our experiences, we recognize them as a changing stream of thoughts and feelings. Because our mind is so habitually contracted, widening the lens requires regular practice.

Widening the lens makes a full and accepting presence possible. Imagine the difference between a herd of wild stallions enclosed in a small corral and those same horses galloping through wide-open plains. This is the difference between seeing life with a narrow focus and widening the lens to a more spacious view. When our field of awareness is open and vast, there is plenty of room for the stallions of fear to kick up dust as they stampede through.

Being genuinely awake in the midst of fear requires the willingness to actively contact the sensations of fear. This intentional way of engaging with fear I call “leaning into fear.”

In a popular teaching story, a man being chased by a tiger leaps off a cliff in his attempt to get away. Fortunately, a tree growing on the side of the cliff breaks his fall. Dangling from it by one arm—tiger pacing above, jutting rocks hundreds of feet below—he yells out in desperation, “Help! Somebody help me!!” A voice responds, “Yes?” The man screams, “God, God, is that you?” Again, “Yes.” Terrified, the man says, “God, I’ll do anything, just please, please, help me.” God responds, “Okay then, just let go.” The man pauses for a moment, then calls out, “Is anyone else there?”

we want to do. We try to avoid the tiger’s mouth and the jutting rocks by accumulating possessions, by getting lost in our mental stories, by drinking three glasses of wine each evening. But to free ourselves from the trance of fear we must let go of the tree limb and fall into the fear, opening to the sensations and the wild play of feelings in our body. We must agree to feel what our mind tells us is “too much.” We must agree to the pain of dying, to the inevitable loss of all that we hold dear.

Leaning into fear does not mean losing our balance and getting lost in fear. Because our usual stance in relating to fear is leaning away from it, to turn and face fear directly serves as a correction. As we lean in, we are inviting, moving toward what we habitually resist. Leaning in allows us to touch directly the quivering, the shakiness, the gripping tightness that is fear.

Like Eric, we can ask, “What is asking for attention?” or, “What is asking for acceptance?” It is especially important to address this inquiry to the sensations we feel in our throat, heart and stomach. These are the areas in our body where fear expresses itself most distinctly.

When we begin to face fear by focusing on sensations, what often happens is our mind immediately produces a story.

The key to awakening from the bonds of fear is to move from our mental stories into immediate contact with the sensations of fear—the squeezing, pressing, burning, trembling, quaking, jittering life in our body. In fact, the story—as long as we remain awake and don’t get stuck in it—can become a useful gateway to the raw fear itself. While the mind will continue to generate stories about what we fear, we can recognize the thoughts for what they are and drop under them again and again to connect with the feelings in our body.

When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.

Naturally there are times when fear is too strong and we don’t feel safe enough to engage with it. If we are feeling contracted and small, we may first need to widen the lens of awareness before bringing our full attention to fear. But in those moments when we can courageously lie down on the icy couch of fear and allow ourselves to experience its sharp edges, we are carried into the love and awareness that are beyond the reach of fear.

When we come face-to-face with the fear and pain in our psyche, we stand at the gateway to tremendous renewal and freedom. Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that, we love freely and are whole. This is the power of Radical Acceptance: When we stop fighting the energy that has been bound in fear, it naturally releases into the boundless sea of awareness. The more we awaken from the grip of fear, the more radiant and free becomes our heart.

If we are waiting only for our fear to end, we will not discover the pure and loving presence that unfolds as we surrender into the darkest of nights. Only by letting go into the stream of life and loss and death do we come into this freedom.

All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors … all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect. Sri Nisargadatta

Compassion means to be with, feel with, suffer with. Classical Buddhist texts describe compassion as the quivering of the heart, a visceral tenderness in the face of suffering.

“May all circumstances serve to awaken compassion.”

As we come to trust in suffering as a gateway to compassion, we undo our deepest conditioning to run away from pain. Rather than struggling against life, we are able to embrace our experience, and all beings, with a full and tender presence.

Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.

When we feel disconnected and afraid, we long for the comfort and peace that come from belonging to something larger and more powerful.

The fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz wrote:   Don’t surrender your loneliness    So quickly. Let it cut more deep.   Let it ferment and season you     As few human Or even divine ingredients can.   Something missing in my heart tonight   Has made my eyes so soft,       My voice     So tender,   My need of God     Absolutely       Clear.

As Hafiz wrote:   Ask the Friend for love.   Ask Him again.   For I have learned that every heart will get   What it prays for     Most.

Whenever we feel closed down, hurt or unforgiving, by simply breathing in and gently touching the rawness of our pain, we can begin to transform our suffering into compassion.

As we breathe out, we can feel our longing to connect and let go into the immensity of the light. We can surrender into the radiant love we yearn for. Breathing in and breathing out, we hold our pain and let our pain be held in a boundless heart of compassion.

When we understand our pain as an intrinsic gateway to compassion, we begin to awaken from the imprisoning story of a suffering self. In the moments when we tenderly hold our anger, for instance, we cut through our identity as an angry self. The anger no longer feels like a personal flaw or an oppressive burden. We begin to see its universal nature—it’s not our anger, it is notour pain. Everyone lives with anger, with fear, with grief.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain   that was entrusted to you. Like the Mother of the World, Who carries the pain of the world in her heart,   Each one of us is part of her heart,       And therefore endowed     With a certain measure of cosmic pain.

I live my life in widening circles That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. Ranier Maria Rilke

Whenever we wholeheartedly attend to the person we’re with, to the tree in our front yard or to a squirrel perched on a branch, this living energy becomes an intimate part of who we are. Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti wrote that “to pay attention means we care, which means we really love.” Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.

As we train ourselves to see past surface appearances, we recognize how we are all the same.

when we reflect on the suffering of others, we realize we are not alone in our pain. We are connected through our vulnerability.

Because involvement with our personal desires and concerns prevents us from paying close attention to anyone else, those around us—even family and friends—can become unreal, two-dimensional cardboard figures, not humans with wants and fears and throbbing hearts.

The more different someone seems from us, the more unreal they may feel to us. We can too easily ignore or dismiss people when they are of a different race or religion, when they come from a different socioeconomic “class.” Assessing them as either superior or inferior, better or worse, important or unimportant, we distance ourselves. Fixating on appearances—their looks, behavior, ways of speaking—we peg them as certain types. They are HIV positive or an alcoholic, a leftist or fundamentalist, a criminal or power monger, a feminist or do-gooder. Sometimes our typecasting has more to do with temperament—the person is boring or narcissistic, needy or pushy, anxious or depressed. Whether extreme or subtle, typing others makes the real human invisible to our eyes and closes our heart.

Once someone is an unreal other, we lose sight of how they hurt. Because we don’t experience them as feeling beings, we not only ignore them, we can inflict pain on them without compunction. Not seeing that others are real leads to a father disowning his son for being gay, divorced parents using their children as weapons. All the enormous suffering of violence and war comes from our basic failure to see that others are real.

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Even if we don’t like someone, seeing their vulnerability allows us to open our heart to them. We might vote against them in an election, we might never invite them to our home, we might even feel they should be imprisoned to protect others. Still, our habitual feelings of attraction and aversion do not have to overrule our basic capacity to see that, like us, they suffer and long to be happy. When we see who is really in front of us, we don’t want them to suffer. Our circle of compassion naturally widens to include them.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

It happens all the time in heaven,   And some day  It will begin to happen  Again on earth—   That men and women …  Who give each other     Light, Often will get down on their knees     And … With tears in their eyes,   Will sincerely speak, saying,     “My dear, How can I be more loving to you;   How can I be more     Kind?”

The more fully we offer our attention, the more deeply we realize that what matters most in life is being kind.

In a touching Sikh story, an aged spiritual master calls his two most devoted disciples to the garden in front of his hut. Gravely, he gives each one a chicken and instructs them, “Go to where no one can see, and kill the chicken.” One of the men immediately goes behind his shed, picks up an ax and chops off his chicken’s head. The other wanders around for hours, and finally returns to his master, the chicken still alive and in hand. “Well, what happened?” the teacher asks. The disciple responds, “I can’t find a place to kill the chicken where no one can see me. Everywhere I go, the chicken sees.”

Every thought we have, every action we take has an impact for good or for ill.

“If you have come to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your destiny is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

When we feel our togetherness, there are countless ways to express our care.

As Mother Teresa teaches, “We can do no great things—only small things with great love.”

Whenever you become aware of suffering, you can practice tonglen. You might see on the TV news a family who has just lost their home in a flood or fire. You might be traveling on the freeway and see a car accident. You might be at an AA meeting, listening as someone describes his or her struggle with alcoholism. Right on the spot you can breathe in, letting yourself feel the immediacy and sharpness of that hurt and fear. Exhaling, release the pain into the openness of awareness, with a prayer for relief. After spending some minutes in this way, enlarge the field of compassion, breathing for all beings who are suffering from loss or trauma or addiction.

Like a caring mother Holding and guarding the life Of her only child, So with a boundless heart Hold yourself and all beings. Buddha

I am larger and better than I thought. I did not think I held so much goodness. Walt Whitman

The word resentment means “to feel again.” Each time we repeat to ourselves a story of how we’ve been wronged, we feel again in our body and mind the anger at being violated. But often enough our resentment of others reflects our resentment of ourselves. When someone rejects us, he or she might be reinforcing a view we already hold—that we’re not good enough, not kind enough, not lovable enough.

Especially when things seem to be falling apart—we lose a job, suffer a serious injury, become estranged from a loved one—our lives can become painfully bound by the experience that something is wrong with us. We buy into the belief that we are fundamentally flawed, bad and undeserving of love.

When we harm ourselves or others, it is not because we are bad but because we are ignorant. To be ignorant is to ignore the truth that we are connected to all of life, and that grasping and hatred create more separation and suffering. To be ignorant is to ignore the purity of awareness and capacity for love that expresses our basic goodness.

“There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.”

Whether our anger and resentment is directed at another or at ourselves, the result is the same—it removes us from the deeper pain of our hurt and shame. As long as we avoid these feelings, we remain trapped in our armor, locked away from love for ourselves and others.

Whether we are angry with ourselves or others, we forgive by letting go of blame and opening to the pain we have tried to push away.

Forgiving ourselves is a process that continues through our whole life. We are so used to replaying the story of what is wrong with ourselves and others that living with a resentful, tight heart can become our most familiar way of being. Thousands of times we might find ourselves caught in stories of what we are doing wrong. Thousands of times we might drop under our blame to where the deeper pain lives. With each round of freeing ourselves through forgiveness, we strengthen our recognition of our basic goodness.

We might worry, as Amy did, that forgiving ourselves is in some way condoning harmful behavior, or giving ourselves permission to continue in hurtful ways. When we forgive ourselves, we are not saying, “I couldn’t help doing what I did … so I might as well forget about it.” Nor are we pushing away responsibility when we release our blaming thoughts. Feeling guilty and bad about ourselves for something we’ve done might temporarily restrain us from doing harm, but ultimately blaming and hating ourselves only leads to further harmful actions. We can’t punish ourselves into being a good person. Only by holding ourselves with the compassion of forgiveness do we experience our goodness and respond to our circumstances with wisdom and care.

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves   birds and animals and the ants— perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in   your mother’s womb …

My beloved child, Break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself you break your own heart. You stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your vitality. The time has come, your time   To live, to celebrate and to see the goodness that you are …   Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obstruct you If one comes, even in the name of “Truth,” forgive it for its unknowing Do not fight. Let go. And breathe—into the goodness that you are.

To know we are forgiven can be deeply liberating, especially when the acceptance embraces our failings with compassion.

When we have released the painful armor of self-blame by feeling forgiven by ourselves and others, we can then in our meditation sincerely offer forgiveness to others.

We can’t will ourselves to forgive—forgiving is a product not of effort but of openness.

We forgive for the freedom of our own heart.

Our intention and willingness to forgive, to let go of resentment and blame, does not mean that we excuse harmful behaviors or allow further injury.

When we forgive, we stop rigidly identifying others by their undesirable behavior. Without denying anything, we open our heart and mind wide enough to see the deeper truth of who they are. We see their goodness. When we do, our hearts naturally open in love.

In our attempts to give up on no one, a useful practice can be to imagine others as infants or children. Another method that can lead us to the precious being outside personality and roles is to imagine that we are seeing someone for the last time, or even that they have already passed away. By letting go of our habitual ways of defining others, we can see the radiant awareness, the goodness of their true nature.

Most of us, however, fall into the habit of pinning a narrow and static identity on those around us. All too often this is based on behaviors we find unpleasant or annoying. We might fixate on how stubborn or rude our child is, or how a colleague brags about his accomplishments. If someone has offended us, we feel wary and guarded each time we see them. If our partner makes a cutting remark to us before leaving for work in the morning, we are ready for more of the same in the evening. We forget that every person, including ourselves, is new every moment.

In his play The Cocktail Party, T. S. Eliot writes:   What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have   Changed since then …   We must   Also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a   Stranger.

By simply offering care, our care begins to wake up.

The practice of seeing goodness awakens lovingkindness, and the practice of lovingkindness enables us to move through life more awake to the goodness within and around us.

“One moment of unconditional love may call into question a lifetime of feeling unworthy and invalidate it.”

“When you say something like [I love you] … with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world.” Because we are interconnected, when we awaken love in ourselves and express it, our love changes the world around us. The hearts of those we touch are opened, and they in turn touch the hearts of others. Love is the basic nature, the goodness of all beings, waiting to manifest. Whether we offer love in silent prayer or aloud, we are helping love to flower in all beings everywhere. This expression of our deepest nature is the living power of lovingkindness—as

When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are—not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.

When we are not consumed by blaming and turning on ourselves or others, we are free to cultivate our talents and gifts together, to contribute them to the world in service. We are free to love each other, and the whole of life, without holding back.

Stay together, friends.   Don’t scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made   Of being awake. Rumi

I sought my god,   my god I could not see I sought my soul,   my soul eluded me I sought my brother   and found all three Anonymous

When the two wings of Radical Acceptance, mindfulness and compassion, are present, our relationships with others become a sacred vessel for spiritual freedom.

If we consider our practice to be “spiritual” only when it takes place in the context of formal meditations, we are missing how critical daily relationships are to our awakening. We are avoiding the disturbing, exciting and confusing emotions that are whipped up in relationships. We are avoiding facing how easily the loving, peaceful person at a silent retreat can turn into an angry and hurtful person when in contact with another human being.

The key elements are: taking responsibility for causing pain to another, listening deeply to understand the person’s suffering, sincerely apologizing and renewing our resolve to act with compassion toward this person and all beings.

When we practice pausing and deepening our attention, instead of being driven by unconscious wants and fears, we open up our options. We can choose to let go of our mental commentary and listen more deeply to another person’s words and experience. We can choose to refrain from saying something that is intended to prove we are right. We can choose to name aloud feelings of vulnerability. We learn to listen deeply and speak with mindful presence, to speak what is helpful and true.

When we expose our own hurt or fear, we actually give others permission to be more authentic.

Some of our deepest awakenings happen through the intimate and loving connections that remind us most fully of who we are.

Not taking pain personally is essential to Radical Acceptance.

By relating to each other with Radical Acceptance, we affirm the truth of who we are. When, in friendship, we release all distancing thoughts and ideas, when we behold each other with clarity and love, we nourish the seeds of liberation.

Training ourselves to be present with each other is a way to integrate mindfulness and lovingkindness into our daily life. In the moments when we communicate with honesty and kindness, we begin to dissolve the trance of separation. Instead of being driven by wanting or fear, we feel increasingly spontaneous and real.

O longing mind, Dwell within the depth Of your own pure nature. Do not seek your home elsewhere … Your naked awareness alone, O mind, Is the inexhaustible abundance For which you long so desperately. Sri Ramakrishna

As we spiritually mature, our yearning to see truth and live with an open heart becomes more compelling than our reflex to avoid pain and chase after pleasure.

We touch the ground by looking directly into the awareness that is the very source of our life. As we connect with what is right in front of us, we realize the true immensity of who we are.

When we sit down to meditate we begin with our immediate experience. As we offer a kind presence to the areas that are most calling for our attention, our body and mind begin to quiet. If we look closely we recognize that our sense of self begins to loosen. At this point there is a tendency to get caught up in a subtle but persistent contraction that still feels like “me.” I am the “one who is calming down” or the “one guiding myself in meditating.” This more diffuse and edgeless sense of self is what I call a “ghost” self. Some call it the observing witness or the self who is watching. Though less entrapping than an angry or fearful self, this ghost self is still a hanging on to an identity that prevents us from being free.

At these times, as I did in the driveway, we can pull the curtain on this faint aura of self-ness by asking, “Who is aware?” We might also ask, “What is aware?” or, “Who am I?” or, “Who is thinking?” We bring mindfulness to awareness itself. We look into awareness. By inquiring and then looking into awareness, we can cut through and dispel the deepest illusions of self that have held us separate and bound.

The most basic way we do this is by holding on to the concept of a stable and enduring self. We try to secure our identity by nailing down our experience.

In a classic Zen story, the disciple Hui-K’e asks his master, Bodhidharma, “Please help me to quiet my mind.” Bodhidharma responds by saying, “Bring me your mind so that I can quiet it.” After a long moment of silence Hui-K’e says, “But I can’t find my mind!” “There,” Bodhidharma replies with a smile. “I have now quieted your mind.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life.

Sri Nisargadatta writes, “The real world is beyond our thoughts and ideas; we see it through the net of our desires divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.”

Everything we can possibly see, hear, feel or imagine—this entire world—is a fantastic display, appearing and vanishing in awareness. When thoughts arise, where do they come from, where do they go to? As you explore looking into the space between thoughts, through the holes in the net, you are looking into awareness itself. You might sit quietly and simply listen for a few moments. Notice how sounds arise and dissolve back into formless awareness. Can you notice the beginnings of sounds, the ends of sounds? The spaces between? It is all happening in awareness, known by awareness.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche writes:   Happiness cannot be found through great effort and will power, But is already there, in relaxation and letting-go. Don’t strain yourself, there is nothing to do … Only our search for happiness prevents us from seeing it … Don’t believe in the reality of good and bad experiences; They are like rainbows.   Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you relax this grasping, space is there —open, inviting, and comfortable.   So, make use of it. All is yours already. Don’t search any further … Nothing to do. Nothing to force, Nothing to want, —and everything happens by itself.

The formless ocean of awareness gives rise to the varying and endless waves of life: emotions, trees, people, stars. Seeing that all of life springs from one awareness, we realize our connectedness and feel the fullness of love. In cherishing all living beings with compassion, we recognize the empty, wakeful awareness that is our common source.

As I let go into this wakeful openness, there was no self who owned the grieving and no friend to lose. I was seeing how this acutely vivid display was just happening, like the movement of the wind or the sudden darkening before a storm. Form is emptiness. There was only the tender field of awareness experiencing the arising and passing of life.

Our grief is the honest recognition that this cherished life is passing. No matter what we lose, we open to the ocean of grief because we are grieving all of this fleeting life. Yet our willingness to go into the black waters of loss reveals our source, the loving awareness that is deathless.

Radical Acceptance is the art of engaging fully in this world—wholeheartedly caring about the preciousness of life—while also resting in the formless awareness that allows this life to arise and pass away.

When we are filled with wanting, grief or fear, prematurely looking toward awareness may be a way of disengaging from the rugged rawness of our emotions.

“Well done, bodhisattva, well done. Walk on through all the fears and pain in this life. Walk on, following your heart and trusting in the power of awareness. Walk on, one step at a time, and you will know a freedom and peace beyond all imagining.”

This is the path—arriving over and over again in the moment with a kind awareness. All that matters on this path of awakening is taking one step at a time, being willing to show up for just this much, touching the ground just this moment.

I am water. I am the thorn that catches someone’s clothing … There’s nothing to believe. Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty … Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now in this ocean of pearling currents, I’ve lost track of which was mine.

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