"Radical Acceptance offers gentle wisdom and tender healing, a most excellent medicine for our unworthiness and longing. Breathe, soften, and let these compassionate teachings bless your heart."
— Jack Kornfield, author of “A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry” (see left to purchase this book)
Radical Acceptance - The Pathway to Freedom
by A.J. Mahari
Whether you have a mental illness, personality disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, love and care
about someone who does, or whether you are stressed out, often anxious, or if you have been sexually abused or
had a traumatic or even a merely difficult up-bringing (most have some wounds from childhood) or consider
yourself to be healthy and just fine Radical Acceptance can and will enhance your overall quality of life and
your spiritual experience in and of everyday life.
Radical Acceptance requires that you change the direction that you allow
your mind to go in. It requires that you accept that you have the ability to act
with the power of choice and that most things we think and do are choices.
Practicing acceptance, actually being accepting of whatever is, is a choice.
It is a choice that brings with it emotional freedom. It is a choice that replaces
chaos and suffering with manageable pain and in time, peace of mind.
Radical Acceptance practice allows us to unearth the very root causes of
so much of our emotional angst and suffering.
Radical Acceptance is a way of saying yes to each and every moment mindfully. If
we can radically accept that we won’t always be accepted or liked by others and that life
is full of challenges, for example, we can clear the pathway from the power of rejection
and negative experience and/or thoughts and how we may have experienced them as severing
our belonging. We can then make way for much more positive thoughts and feelings. Rejection
or any other defined negative experience only has the power that we continue to give it.
Radical Acceptance, in essence frees us up emotionally in reassuring ways that allow us to
take back our personal power, or to not give it away to circumstance and whim anymore.
Practicing Radical Acceptance will, as Dr. Wayne Dyer, talks about in his book, Your Sacred Self”
enable you to become more in tune with your “observer self”. It is from this “observer self” that one
can begin to see things much more clearly. You can merely observe and accept whatever is. You don’t have
to react to it. You don’t have to interpret it as “good” or “bad”. It can just be and so too can you just
be. Just be with it, whatever, it is. Radically accept it. By doing so you will be exercising the
power of your “observer self” and as a result you will be able to choose to stay in a calm and peaceful
state no matter what emotions you are observing and/or feeling. Your “observer self” does not do anything
with the emotions that you feel or that are at hand. They are just observed as existing. No more and no less.
Literally, using radical acceptance, through your “observer self” will gift you with the true “power
of now” (Eckhart Tolle). The power of now is the inherent reality that willfully we can experience whatever
the now has to offer us through observing and radically accepting without interpreting or taking any action
whatsoever. This is freeing.
In Your Sacred Self Dr. Wayne Dyer says, "The little three-letter word ego has had
various meanings applied to it...there are many misinterpretations of the word ego...I look upon
the ego as nothing more than an idea that each of us has about ourselves. That is, the ego is only an
illusion, but a very influential one...The ego is a mental, invisible, formless, boundaryless idea.
It is nothing more than the idea you have of your self -- your body/mind/soul self. Ego as a think
is non-existent. It is an illusion. Entertaining that illusion can prevent you from knowing your true
self."
A.J. Mahari's Ebooks, Audio Programs, and Life Coaching Services
As I have written in my up-coming ebook, (Coming Very Soon) The Shadows and Echoes of Self:
The Essential Journey of Reclamation, "Your true self awaits your mindful radical acceptance of things, thoughts, feelings, people, and
events in your life. Your true self awaits your warm nurturing loving kindness, your forgiveness, your
attention to his/her woundedness and pain. It is in these precious new moments of radical acceptance that the
true self begins to slowly re-awaken from a trauma-induced slumber of denial and bullying abandonment through
one's own pain by his/her false self. That knock on the door of your soul is your spirited inner-child, authenticity
personified clamoring to get your attention that he/she might have, finally, his/her wounded unmet needs
satiated" (A.J. Mahari)
Learning about, reading about, and then beginning to practice Radical Acceptance is a crucial aspect
of learning to find, know, and continue to develop your authentic self. Radical Acceptance, in my experience
is like a pause button on a VCR, it gives you time to experience things that you otherwise wouldn't. These
experiences over time begin to be life-changing. These new experiences, even seconds at a time will open
small new windows for any and all who have become enslaved to the repetitive and self-defeating worry thoughts
and cognitively-distorted beliefs of his/her false self.
There is an inherent reality in each now that is missed and lost if we aren't radically accepting
what is in each unfolding present moment. Ekhart Tolle, in his book, The Power of Now says, "Instead
of 'watching the thinker' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your
attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying
thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in
which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation...The single most
vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you
create a gap in the stream of the mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger."
It is important to not have your sense of self dependant upon the content of your mind. Living merely
at the whim of each and every thought denies your soul room to be and to breathe. We are much more than
our minds. In fact, as Tolle points out in his book, The Power of Now our minds our tools that we
have at our disposal for specific tasks. Like any tool, a drill or a screwdriver, which we put away after
we are finished using it for a specific task, we also need to lay down our minds from time to time. We
no longer merely think, in this day and age, but we are actually more often than not, addicted to thinking
and to processing information. We are addicted to thinking as a means of escape and also because we have
identified ourselves with our thinking. We are much more than we think. This ghost-self that is addicted
to thinking is the ego. To the ego, of which the false self is king, the present moment rarely exists.
The more you practice Radical Acceptance and allow the space of observation to permeate your experience
the more you will learn to lay down your mind. This makes room for you to get in touch with a much more
profound aspect of self - your true self, in all its authenticity which is the spiritual aspect of who you
are -- your soul.
If we are able to be fully present through radically accepting what is observing things such as our
inner-body, our thoughts and feelings, events around us, surrender from a place of loving kindness and
forgiveness and understanding and be a witness to the unmanifested of each moment we will be open to the
ever-transforming reality of the power of now.
Radical acceptance means that we have to consciously choose to be aware in and of each and every moment.
We need to be willing to choose to accept what is. Willing to surrender our wilfullness. Wilfullness is what
often leads us to choose to deny what is and fight it with illogical thoughts, worry, anxiety and the like.
It is not a fight that we often win really. Not accepting what is causes a tremendous amount of anxiety
and worry and traps you in your suffering. Even if we have pain, accepting it and not fighting it can
keep our pain from turning into suffering. There is a difference between pain and suffering.
Most of us don’t realize how much of our thinking is narrow, black and white, at times, and also very
repetitive. Not to mention, often, negative and protective, often without cause. These kinds of thought
patterns are always destined to give us similar feelings. Feelings that create anxiety and worry and
leave us fearful and even angry. Feelings that, if acted upon, often produce very unwanted impulsive
self-defeating and regrettable behaviour.
A.J. Mahari's Ebooks, Audio Programs, and Life Coaching Services
So much of what can be ruminated about and dwelt upon is what produces most of the anxiety and worry
that many are suffering with and from. You can choose to stop it. You really can. By staying in the moment,
being mindful, and radically accepting whatever is you can eliminate the ruminating and the need to worry
and react in anxiety-producing ways. So much worry and anxiety originates with "what-if" thoughts or thoughts
that build each feeling into a catastrophe of sorts usually with very dramatic reaction. If you make a choice
to accept what is in the unfolding moment, mindfully, one moment at a time you can spare yourself the suffering
from these cognitively-distorted anxiety-producing thoughts.
Radical acceptance does provide emotional freedom. It does this by freeing up our minds long enough with
new information and possibility that we see that ruminating, dwelling on thoughts and worrying about things
past or future robs us totally of every here and now unfolding present moment.
Life lived mindfully, with radical acceptance of all that is in each and every unfolding here and now
moment is manageable and transforms endless suffering into manageable pain and in time, into a greater more
stable and consistent peace of mind.
When you radically accept something as being just as it is, no matter how initially undesirable the
thought, emotion, or reality might be, you are freeing yourself to be able to, over time, cope much more
effectively because you will be at the root of what actually is and not responding to how things appear to
be or how you wish things were.
It is very important to work at tolerating the thoughts and feelings that you may have, for so long,
felt very adverse to. Radically accepting them gives you an opportunity to get to know them in a new and
more productive and manageable way. You will come to gain more insight into how you think and how that
leaves you feeling by accepting what is and allowing yourself to equally accept how what is really
feels without trying to deny it, push it away, mask it and/or escape from it.
Radical Acceptance unleashes our potential to experience the power of each and every now. It gives
us an wonderful opportunity to experience more of what is, as it is and to learn to not react to anything
and everything out of faulty thinking or faulty interpretations.
Whether you have a mental illness, personality disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, love and care
about someone who does, or whether you are stressed out, often anxious, or if you have been sexually abused or
had a traumatic or even a merely difficult up-bringing (most have some wounds from childhood) or consider
yourself to be healthy and just fine Radical Acceptance can and will enhance your overall quality of life and
your spiritual experience in and of everyday life.
© Ms. A.J. Mahari January 16, 2006
Learn more about Linehan's Radical Acceptance Distress Tolerance Module PDF Format
as of January 16, 2006
This page is © 2006-2008 A.J. Mahari - last up-dated October 14, 2008
