Book "Radical Acceptance" Study and Practice Group

River

Active member
This thread is a reading and study group for the book...

Radical Acceptance:
Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
By Tara Brach
http://www.tarabrach.com/

I'm finding the book intensely useful, powerful, and transformative. No doubt the exciting changes I'm experiencing at this time are as a result of my being ready, of my willingness, my choice, to grow and heal, but the book came to me at just that moment when I was ready and willing to dive deep. I'd like to share the process of working with this excellent and powerful book and teaching.

Just say "Hi" if you're reading the book. And let's share our thoughts and experiences here.

The connection with polyamory seems obvious to me, though this book is in no way about that subject. It is, however, about opening to the adventure of love beyond familiar habits of fear, shame and imagined inadequacy.

Welcome!

Do to an unfortunate accident, an earlier version of this thread was erased. So, if you've posted here before and lost that, please again say Hi to the group. Let's get started afresh.
 
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One day when I was still a young man I was involved in an automobile accident. It was pretty serious, in that the car rolled multiple times through a lane of highway traffic that included enormous "semi" trucks. No one was seriously hurt, but the experience was a profoundly tramatic one, emotionally. When I arrived home, instead of comforting me, my father expressed anger at the driver, at the whole thing.... What I needed was warmth, a loving embrace. Such responses from him, and from my mother, were not uncommon. My emotional needs were not much understood, appreciated, acknowledged, seen....

I tell this in this moment with a raw feeling of hurt and vulnerability. All such experiences are in the foreground. There is a long string of them.

I wasn't (not often enough) held when I needed holding, wasn't loved when I needed loving. And through all of that I learned the habit of treating my own feeling life much as I had been treated in my family as a kid. I'm experiencing deep insight into this pattern. Reading Radical Acceptance has much to do with this process.

Earlier today I was feeling some emotional pain, some contraction..., and I realized how
impatient I am with my own emotional pain. In truth, I just wanted it to go away. I wanted to be done with it. I realized this is how my parents were in their relationship with their own pain -- and mine. Well, I'm still feeling it, really. It isn't pain about anything in particular, to be projected on a person or a situation. It's just pain. Old pain.

Was it yesterday? (My sense of time is a little awry, as I'm all stirred up at the moment.) Roughly yesterday I was feeling this pain and I decided to just be with it -- while washing dishes and then making dinner. The stabbing pain (much of it 'round the heart) would have had me go lay down, collapse (in a sense), maybe flip on the tv or have a drink..., or.... But I stood tall and on task. I'd let myself collapse later, if need be. But as I stood tall in it I noticed something arise. Tenderness, warmth. It wasn't really "self-directed". It was just tenderness meeting strength meeting pain. Tenderness meeting strength -- each welcoming one another, touching, meeting.... I was beginning to learn yet more about how to "hold" myself, give myself what I really need.

I'm learning not to shrink in fear of my own pain. I'm learning to stand tall and not turn away. I'm learning not to want "it" (myself, really) to go away. My task here is not to "be done with "it" / myself.

In standing tall I can offer more of my gifts.

Warmly, tenderly. To all.
 
What unspoken, silent voice
Said tenderness is weakness?

Who would conceal this thought
As if to reveal it would be consent
To have me painted thin?

I've always known tenderness is strength.
But the knowing lay hidden,
Partially concealed --

Like an archaological find.

Like a proud thing
covered in mud.
 
Hi, I ordered ours on Amazon, ....

I'm glad you'll be having a look at this book, RP! It would be nice if you'd join in the discussion about the book and our experiences working with it.

Several other folks here said their book was on order or that they had a copy. Then the initial copy of this thread was accidently deleted. So..., if you are reading it or planning to read it, please raise your cyber hand and say Hello.
 
"When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper."​


— D.H. Lawrence​

I found this quoted in a book today. It spoke to this moment -- this moment for me, but also this moment for all of us. This moment of flux and the necessity of change.

I think Lawrence is saying about the "ego" and the "personality" that it/these are where we "know ourselves," where the familiar is met with the familiar, where our sense of "what/who I am" peers through a glass, darkly, and calls the familiar Home. But too often the familiar is a projected screen. We know ourselves not by holding or clinging to the familiar, but by getting into "the forest" -- the unfamiliar, the seemingly strange. Here, we meet another kind of familiar, one not conditioned by clinging to "the glass bottle" of our familiar identity and habits. Here is where we meet our power. And this power is ... dare I say it?: Revolutionary. Not in terms of guns and bombs, but in terms of institutions losing a basis in fear and greed, self-seeking in the narrow "ego" way. That is the familiar, right? Yet it robs us of our true power -- our authenticity. Courage is a matter of the heart. Etymologists know this.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=courage


.
 
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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?

- Rumi


This book has done something for me that I haven't yet identified. Half way through, the fearful voices of daemons have diminished and the graceful love of self has increased. Acceptance of the present moment is Big Medicine. Maybe the biggest. Inviting Mara to tea is the only the beginning. One can not open the heart fully and expect to only welcome what's pleasant. A full life is a collection of fully embodied moments. The sensations of those moments are not as important as the fullness of experiencing them.
 
.... One can not open the heart fully and expect to only welcome what's pleasant. ....

Ain't that the truth! So many of us have this poisoned notion that "spirituality" -- spiritual life, growth -- is all flowers and light, joy and peace.... But that's marketing, not spirituality. That's how "new age" bookstores scent the air.

Tenderness NEEDS strength and courage! It withers and blows away without it. And yet real strength has tenderness. Strength without tenderness is blind power. TenderStrength is ... the open heart.

It is often said that when we stop resisting or moving away from our heart pain, which often happens when it feels more than we can bear, then arive the healing insights and "sweetness and light". Right there in the thorns on the rose, amid the "teeth" of the world.
 
My whole life
is a pivot!

I am the rounding
of a bend

I notice my foot,
my leg

Each muscle involved
is watched

Every metaphor
and sensation

is the novelty
of becoming

present
 
Before the original version of this thread was forever lost in cyberspace (by accident), several folks in the forum said they had either ordered the book (Radical Acceptance) or were reading it.

So... How is it?
 
It's a really great book. I'm currently reading it and I also bought the audiobook by Tara Brach called Meditations for Emotional Healing and finding both very helpful in getting past a lot of the emotional baggage I have from growing up that's making the change to poly in my marriage difficult. It's definitely worth a read.
 
I'll have to order this book. Looks really interesting!
 
I bought it a while back and haven't started it yet. For some reason, over the past few years, I have a really hard time reading books. It takes me forever to get started, and to get through them. I used to be a voracious, fast reader. Anyway, I will post here after I've gotten through it, I promise!
 
Anyway, I will post here after I've gotten through it, I promise!

Why not after reading the first chapter, or two?

Even I have not finished the book! It's okay to give it time, take it at your own pace.
 
So, Radical Acceptance has been a doorway for me. I, too, haven't finished it. It's intense like that. At the beginning, it resonated with me. "The trance of fear" is a state I know well. So I dove into it. I began meditating and using the techniques described to good effect. I felt calmer. I learned to get in touch with my senses on a deeper level and occupy the space I'm in with compassionate attention. Really investigating my physical presence and at the same time experiencing the regularly scheduled noise of my thoughts. I learned to feel fear and not be ashamed of it. Not to judge my experience, but simply experience it. That was liberating. In a sense, I could now stand outside myself and witness the process of my jealousy, my doubts, my ancient pains... and feel compassion for myself. What a gift!

I have since stopped formally meditating and started doing other things meditatively. Running, walking the dogs, working with my hands. Simply pausing throughout the day and consciously examining the moment I'm in is enough for now. I have dug deep enough for the time being. I have plenty to work with and plenty to work on. To be honest, it got a little exhausting. I imagine I'll return to the book now and again until I've finished it, but right now I'm in no hurry.
 
Beautiful!

I, too, am in no hurry.

In any case, working with words / thoughts / ideas / books / the written word occupies a LOT of my daily life. So it's nothing for me to slowly work through a bunch of books over time -- all going at once.

By the way, Catfish, I'm sorry for not having responded to your email request. I wanted to provide a kind of mini biography, but that was too daunting and it caused me to procrastinate. I'll be in touch by email soon.
 
nycindie,

My favorite quote from Rilke is "Live the questions".

Is it self-hatered that runs us? Or is it self-ignorance? How do these relate? Are they the same? How? (etc.)....

As it seems to me at the moment, I did not grow up in a culture that really supported and encouraged self-knowledge. In many respects, indeed, I seem to be one of millions of folks here who have been encouraged to supplant actual self-knowledge with a pseudo version (psuedo? whatever!). Self-knowledge, then, begins with stealing fire, with traipsing out away from the crowd and the proper, normal, accepted, acceptable norms.... Not that all truth is outside of the "norms," rather, there's no testing of gold against fools gold witout risking the discovery that one has invested in the latter.

That risk is the beginning place of genuine self-discovery. It is also its endpoint. Seen rightly.

Welcome home!
 
Wild Geese


You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver
 
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