An excerpt from the prologue, "Something is Wrong With Me".
For so many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn't take much - just hearing of someone else's accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work - to make us feel that we are not okay.
As a friend of mine put it, "Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing." 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.
A meditation student at a retreat I was teaching told me about an experience that brought home to her the tragedy of living in trance. Marilyn had spent many hours sitting at the bedside of her dying mother - reading to her, meditating next to her late at night, holding her hand and telling her over and over that she loved her. Most of the time Marilyn's mother remained unconscious, her breath labored and erratic. One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. "You know," she whispered softly, "all my life I thougth something was wrong with me." Shaking her head slightly, as if to say, "what a waste," she closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma. Several hours later she passed away.
We don't have to wait until we are on our deathbed to realize what a waste of our precious lives it is to carry the belief that something is wrong with us. Yet because our habits of feeling insufficient are so strong, awakening from the trance involves not only inner resolve, but also an active training of the heart and mind. Through Buddhist awareness practices, we free ourselves from the suffering of trance by learning to recognize what is true in the present moment, and by embracing whatever we see with an open heart. This cultivation of mindfulness and compassion is what I call Radical Acceptance.
Radical Acceptance reverses our habit of living at war with experiences that are unfamiliar, frightening or intense. It is the necessary antidote to years of neglecting ourselves, years of judging and treating ourselves harshly, years of rejecting this moment's experience. Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is. A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.
The twentieth-century Indian meditation master Sri Nisargadatta encourages us to wholeheartedly enter this path of freedom: "...all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect." For Mariliyn, the final words of her dying mother awakened her to this posibility. As she put it, "It was her parting gift. I realized I didn't have to lose my life in that same way that she did. Out of love - for my mother, for life - I resolved to hold myself with more acceptance and kindness." We can each choose the same.
When we practice Radical Acceptance, we begin with the fears and wounds of our own life and discover that our heart of compassion widens endlessly. In holding ourselves with compassion, we become free to love this living world. This is the blessing of Radical Acceptance: As we free ourselves from the suffering of "something is wrong with me," we trust and express the fullness of who we are.
from - Radical Acceptance - Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
pages 3-4.
by Tara Brach, PH. D. published by Bantam Books, 2003