Radical Acceptance

In his book Touching Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh draws upon the Buddha’s teachings to offer ways to handle situations when we’ve hurt others.

By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.

Finally one day came a shifting-into-place, an awakening: not “right” compared to what? Oh, my word, I’d been trying to make canned Pillsbury biscuits! Then came an exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some (previously hidden) standard. They were wheaty, flaky, buttery, “sunny, earthy, real” (as Rilke’s sonnet

Caught in the trance of unworthiness, our desires fixate on soothing, once and for all, our anxiety about imperfection. We strive to tie up all the loose ends and to avoid making mistakes, even though we know both are impossible. We want to feel “good enough” all the time in our work, parenting, relationships, health, appearance, and life. We want

pretending, judging and distancing. In his book Meditating Together, Speaking from Silence, vipassana teacher Gregory Kramer offers a practice that can help us break such patterns of reaction right

felt in my life. In the room where I meditate, I have a Tibetan scroll painting (called a thanka) of the bodhisattva of compassion. Known as Tara in Tibet and Kwan Yin in China, she is an embodiment of healing and compassion.

As Pema Chödrön puts it: “When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.”

In one of the Jataka tales, mythical teaching stories based on the Buddha’s previous lifetimes,

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.