Radical Acceptance

wholesome, in nature, with friends, but it also included an impulsive kind of thrill drugs, sex, and other adventures. In the eyes of the world, I was highly functional. Internally, I was anxious, driven, and often depressed. I didn't feel at peace with any part of my life. Feeling not okay went hand in hand with deep loneliness. In my early teens, I sometimes imagined that I was living inside a transparent orb that separated me from the people and life around me. When I felt good about myself and did ease with others, the bubble thinned until it was like an invisible wisp of gas. When I felt bad about myself, the walls got so thick it seemed others must be able to see them. Imprisoned within, I felt hollow and achingly alone. The fantasy faded somewhat as I got older, but I lived with the fear of letting someone down or being rejected myself. With my college friend, it was different. I trusted her enough to be completely open. Over the next two days of hiking on high mountain ridges, sometimes talking with her, sometimes sitting in silence, I began to realize that beneath all my mood swings, depression, loneliness, and addictive behavior, lurked that feeling of deep personal deficiency. I was getting my first clear glimpse into a core of suffering that I would revisit again and again in my life. While I felt exposed and raw, I intuitively knew that by facing this pain I was entering a path of healing. As we drove down from the mountains that Sunday night, my heart was lighter but still aching. I longed to be kinder to myself. I longed to befriend my inner experience and to feel more intimacy and ease with the people in my life. When some years later these longings drew me to the Buddhist path, I found there the teachings and practices that enabled me to directly face my feelings of unworthiness and insecurity. They gave me a way of seeing clearly what I was experiencing and showed me how to relate to my life with compassion. The teachings of the Buddha also helped undo my painful and mistaken notion that I was alone in my suffering, that it was a personal problem and somehow my fault. For the past 20 years as a psychologist and Buddhist teacher, I've worked with thousands of clients and students who have revealed how painfully burdened they feel by a sense of not being good enough. Whether our conversation takes place in the middle of a 10-day meditation retreat or during a weekly therapy session, the suffering, the fear of being flawed and unworthy is basically the same. For so many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn't take much, just hearing someone else's accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work, to make us feel that we are not okay. As a friend of mine put it, feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing. When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are. A meditation student at a retreat I was teaching told me about an experience that brought home to her the tragedy of living in trance. Marilyn had spent many hours sitting at the bedside of her dying mother, reading to her, meditating next to her late at night, holding her hand and telling her over and over that she loved her. Most of the time, Marilyn's mother remained unconscious, her breath labored and erratic. One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. You know, she whispered softly, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. Shaking her head slightly as if to say, what a waste. She closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma. Several hours later, she passed away. We don't have to wait until we are on our deathbed to realize what a waste of our precious lives it is to carry the belief that something is wrong with us. Yet because our habits of feeling insufficient are so strong, awakening from the trance involves not only inner resolve, but also self-awareness.