Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.

With an undefended heart, we can fall in love with life over and over every day. We can become children of wonder, grateful to be walking on earth, grateful to belong with each other and to all of creation. We can find our true refuge in every moment, in every breath.

On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.

We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.

When we relax about imperfection, we no longer lose our life moments in the pursuit of being different and in the fear of what is wrong.

I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.

That non-attachment gives us the freedom to be exactly who we are.