“Radical Acceptance”

Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris

December 2, 2007 

As we enter into the holiday season, I think of bread.  Sometime in the next month or so, I am bound to take an afternoon and bake bread.  And when I do, I will pull off my cookbook shelf an ingredient-spattered version of the Tassajara Bread Book, written by Ed Brown, the Zen teacher and founder of the famous Greens natural foods restaurant in San Francisco.   My relationship with this cooking guru dates back about 20 years to when I first got interested in bread-baking, religion and meditation.  So I was interested to read that when he was first a cook at the Tassajara retreat center, he would get very angry with himself because he just could NOT get his biscuits to come out right.  And then, he writes, he had a revelation:

Finally, one day came a shifting-into-place, an awakening:  Not right compared to what?  Oh my word, I had been trying to make canned Pillsbury Biscuits!  Then came the exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some (previously hidden) standard.  They were wheaty, flaky, buttery, “sunny, earthy, real” (as Rilke’s sonnet proclaims). They were incomparably alive, present, vibrant—in fact they were much more satisfactory than any memory.

Ed Brown’s inability to produce the kind of biscuits that come premade in a cardboard tube illustrates the small and relatively harmless ways we can hurt ourselves.  His example is pretty innocuous—many of us hold ourselves to unreasonable standards in much more harmful ways. Since the winter holidays have become a magnet for Martha Stewart organizational perfection, and since this is also a time when often we touch troublesome family dynamics, either through visiting or through the memories holidays stir, this is a good time to think about the ways we lack compassion towards ourselves.

Our condemnation of ourselves can be much more destructive than Brown’s was.  Perhaps you live with a message from your earliest days that you are always falling short of some required perfection.  Or maybe you have some act or lack of action from your past which you feel represents an unforgiveable offense.  Tara Brach, who is both a Buddhist teacher and counselor, believes that we all have parts of our lives which we condemn or push away.  These limit, she says, both our ability to be fully present in our own lives and our ability to be fully present to the other lives around us.  We develop all kinds of strategies to avoid the pain of our own inadequacy. 

Maybe we embark on one self-improvement project after another.  Maybe we just don’t take risks, playing it safe, rather than risking failure or having to look at the less attractive side of ourselves.  Maybe we take one of the myriad options available to us to withdraw from the true experience of the present moment.  Maybe we just stay very busy.  Maybe we live only in our head and cut ourselves off from our bodies.  Maybe we take it out on ourselves, becoming our own persecutor.  Maybe we focus on the faults of others around us. 

The first principle we covenant as Unitarian Universalists to affirm and promote is the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  The trick –and for some of us—the real work comes in applying that statement to ourselves. 

As a kid, because of illness and discord in my home, I took on serious responsibilities at a young age.  The fact that I was cooking or grocery shopping or doing home repair wasn’t really that harmful, what was so dangerous was that I had an idea in my head that I needed to make everything better for people I loved.  My journey toward religion, (and meditation and bread baking for that matter) was about understanding that I am part of a larger whole, that I am not responsible for it all, that, in fact, most of it is beyond my control. 

That has been transformative—as Ed Brown writes:

These occasions can be so stunning, so liberating, these moments when you realize your life is just fine as it is, thank you.  Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product made it seem insufficient.  Trying to produce a biscuit—a life—with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger was so frustrating.  Then savoring, actually tasting the present moment of experience—how much more complex and multifaceted.  How unfathomable. 

As a teenager, I was very clear about one thing.  I did not want to have the hurts that had affected me to be my identity: I wasn’t interested in being a victim.  Yet in my passion to push things away, they almost swamped me.  Acknowledging these real sources of pain and greeting them with compassion is what Brach calls “radical acceptance.” To do this, we must embrace those sides of us we see as most repulsive, most unforgiveable, to be willing to be present and even caring to them.  Brach is clear this is not resignation to one’s faults, or an excuse for withdrawal, or self-indulgence or passivity.  It is rather the commitment to become “authentically and wholly alive” by facing that which we do not wish to face about ourselves and the world and then be able to hold it with love. 

Only after we practice radical acceptance of all the truths of our lives, can we be truly present to the fact that these truths are held by others, can we feel compassion to others who suffer as we do and to others who suffer in different ways.  When we can grasp this, even for a moment, we become both the “holder and the held” as Brach says. “When we harm ourselves or others, it is not because we are bad, but because we are ignorant,” she writes.  “To be ignorant is to ignore the truth that we are connected to all life, and that the grasping and hatred create more separation and suffering.”

A willingness to embrace hard truths—and then to use them as a path to greater connection is a part of our religious heritage.  Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” Yet the idea of forgiving ourselves is something I suspect would generate impatience in many of us. Unitarian Universalists tend to be very outwardly oriented people.  If someone needs to do something, make some change, they are much more likely to do it if it will benefit someone else than to benefit themselves.  And yet the truth seems to be that it is only when we are able to be gentle with ourselves, as the song says, that we are able to open our arms wide and embrace the rest of the world. 

By facing the parts of our lives we find abhorrent, we can regain control over them, we can forgive ourselves and we can find the capacity to truly forgive others. 

Stanford University’s Fred Luskin also works with forgiveness.  The Stanford University Forgiveness Project has documented the physical benefits of forgiving others.  Through controlled experiments, Luskin measured reductions in stress-related health problems in those who have made an effort to forgive. He believes his systematic, step-by-step method for forgiveness translates directly into better health, not only for an individual, also for a community.  He and his colleagues have taken their work into the lives of women whose sons were killed in the conflicts in Northern Ireland. 

Forgiveness is important, Luskin says, because of our energy-intensive tendency to create “grievance stories,” taking real harms that were done to us and then letting them become the central organizing force of our life.  In a grievance story, you relive your anger, fear, sadness in the telling and it becomes a story you tell to explain why your life has not worked out the way you had hoped.  Even though the pain you have experienced is real, people will stop wanting to hear this story.  The cost of all of this is what Luskin calls “renting too much space to disappointment.”  This is not to excuse real hurts that people do to one another—the disappointments when someone does not do what seems fair, the betrayals of trust and truth, the real scars of abuse.  The idea is that we should not continue to suffer for those acts by letting them control the precious energy of our lives. 

Brach and Luskin offer different paths towards forgiveness—and yet they walk some of the same ground.  They both believe support and accountability are important for true forgiveness because it is not as simple as saying, “Okay, I forgive you” –instead it is a repeated set of commitments that says you will continue to hold the actions of the other person with compassion.  For Brach, my journey begins with forgiving myself and the undesirable actions I make because the places I am hurt and when I can do that, I can begin to have truer compassion for the suffering of others. 

Both also believe we must create a space to acknowledge pain and create new and conscious ways of holding it.  Brach calls it the “sacred pause” –the idea of taking a breath before acting out of old patterns.  On Thursdays at 1, some of us will be gathering for a mostly silent hour this month—the not so silent part is that we will be beginning with a few minutes of focused meditation using Tara Brach’s book.  If you need a place to be the holder and the held—or perhaps to lower your blood pressure in this season of extra busy-ness, please join us.  Or in some way, consider making the space in your life for compassion toward yourself.  Some opening like the one poet David Whyte describes when he writes:

Enough.  These few words are enough.

If not these words than this breath.

If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life

We have refused, again and again, until now.  Until now.

In the last couple months, as I have been privileged to sit with some of you, sometimes after a death, sometimes because of a crucial decision you face, sometimes just because it is time to talk, I have been struck at how much we all carry—the hidden loads we have like so many everyday superheroes.  All that is our life is truly remarkable.  And if those loads can be lightened by truly acknowledging those parts of ourselves we have been trying to hide, putting down the five-ton weight of shame and anger, how much easier it would be for us to create more justice, equity and compassion in our own lives and the lives all around us.  Maybe then, in this meditative time of year, we could truly say “thank you life and all you are.”  How much more true would that make the gifts we give—gifts to those we don’t know, such as our service through PACEM or through the Giving Tree, and gifts of true presence to those in our lives and in the wider world. 

In this season of giving, let us give ourselves the gift of radical acceptance.  Then our gifts to ourselves, to those we love, to our community and our world can be grounded in a true, compassionate presence.  

Benediction

Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, who worked with those in India whom no others helped

We can do no great things—only small things with great love.