Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.
Tara BrachRead
We wait for things to be different in order to feel okay with life. As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we’ll always be left waiting for it.
Interpretation
Happiness should not be reliant on external circumstances that are constantly changing.
Tara Brach's quote highlights the importance of internal contentment rather than seeking happiness from external situations. It suggests that if we continuously wait for our lives to improve before allowing ourselves to feel satisfied, we will remain perpetually unfulfilled, as external changes are unpredictable and beyond our control.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding inner peace.
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.
Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, 'Hey, come back over here, reconnect.' The only way that you'll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.
We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.
There is so much division in this world. So what is really the path of healing? It can begin in this moment, by embracing the life that's here.
The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.
The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.
I used food to make myself feel better, but I felt worse when I ate.
I'm from New Orleans, which is all about direct engagement out in the street with all the parades and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals. I'm trying to take that and put it into my generation, a group that doesn't have enough joy and celebration in their lives.
Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment.
Happiness is the ultimate goal...The mistake we make is not going for happiness first. If we did, everything else would follow.
Happiness can’t be reduced to a few agreeable sensations. Rather, it is a way of being and of experiencing the world—a profound fulfillment that suffuses every moment and endures despite inevitable setbacks.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.