Radical Acceptance Quotes

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“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.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Imperfection is not our personal problem - it is a natural part of existing.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“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. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“What would it be like if I could accept life--accept this moment--exactly as it is?”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“I found myself praying: "May I love and accept myself just as I am.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The color of an autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal. . . . The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant, for hours or for seasons of our life. . . . We may pause in the midst of meditation to let go of thoughts and reawaken our attention to the breath. We may pause by stepping out of daily life to go on a retreat or to spend time in nature or to take a sabbatical. . . . You might try it now: Stop reading and sit there, doing "no thing," and simply notice what you are experiencing.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“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.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Staying occupied is a socially sanctioned way of remaining distant from our pain.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame

“The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“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.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“The poet Longfellow writes, “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.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“We focus on other people’s faults. There is a saying that the world is divided into people who think they are right. The more inadequate we feel, the more uncomfortable it is to admit our faults. Blaming others temporarily relieves us from the weight of failure. The painful truth is that all of these strategies simply reinforce the very insecurities that sustain the trance of unworthiness. The more we anxiously tell ourselves stories about how we might fail or what is wrong with us or with others, the more we deepen the grooves—the neural pathways—that generate feelings of deficiency. Every time we hide a defeat we reinforce the fear that we are insufficient. When we strive to impress or outdo others, we strengthen the underlying belief that we are not good enough as we are. This doesn’t mean that we can’t compete in a healthy way, put wholehearted effort into work or acknowledge and take pleasure in our own competence. But when our efforts are driven by the fear that we are flawed, we deepen the trance of unworthiness.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“We might begin by scanning our body . . . and then asking, "What is happening?" We might also ask, "What wants my attention right now?" or, "What is asking for acceptance?”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha