Perhaps the biggest trage 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.
Summary - Radical acceptance is a way of coping with lifes difficulties. It involves accepting your flaws and the things that you cannot change, without being judgmental about them. Western society is constantly criticizing itself and questioning its self-worth. Radical acceptance offers an antidote to this problem by helping people accept difficult emotions without judging themselves.
Winner, winner. After last month’s thumbs down planned self-help book, I was eager to jump into this one especially since my therapist recommended it (and all of her teachings, really). I thought I understood what ‘meditation’ was so I thought this book was going to be one whole book about quieting my mind, well, it wasn’t, it was so much more.
This book was broken down so that each chapter teaches a different way to handle the hard things in life: whether it’s something you’re going through, old traumas that get triggered in everyday life, or how we interact with others/loved ones. I can’t recommend this book enough. Here’s another (of many) quotes I loved:
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.
I plan on reading through some of Brach’s other work and also revisiting this one down the road.
Have you heard of Tara Brach? If you have, do you have a favorite book by her or one you’ve been meaning to read?
Find Radical Acceptance at the publisher →
Toni Rocchetti is a copy editor helping authors strengthen their narratives, deepen character arcs, and find the story that is already in the draft. She reads 80+ books a year across literary fiction, memoir, and nonfiction — and writes about what she is learning along the way. Work with Toni →
