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fraeyalise's review
1) Graphic, unnecessary description of child sexual assault that came out of nowhere.
2) Does she even have consent to share the stories of her patients in such graphic detail?
3) The white and class privilege here is grating on me.
I've gotten all I can out of this book. I'm cautious, apprehensive, and wary of reading any more of her anecdotes because of how matter-of-factly she inserted the graphic CSA and rape descriptions.
I was a little triggered by her miscarriage and birth stories as well, but the CSA was the huge final straw.
2) Does she even have consent to share the stories of her patients in such graphic detail?
3) The white and class privilege here is grating on me.
I've gotten all I can out of this book. I'm cautious, apprehensive, and wary of reading any more of her anecdotes because of how matter-of-factly she inserted the graphic CSA and rape descriptions.
I was a little triggered by her miscarriage and birth stories as well, but the CSA was the huge final straw.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Child abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Pedophilia, Incest, Emotional abuse, Panic attacks/disorders, and Abandonment
Moderate: Pregnancy
Minor: Miscarriage
katharina90's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Much longer than it needs to be which makes it feel really slow. I also think some of it hasn't aged well.
Nevertheless it contains a few helpful takeaways and I like that the author gives credit to Buddhist teachings rather than repackaging and selling mindfulness and various meditation exercises as her own invention which so often happens in the self-help space.
Brock describes radical acceptance as "the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is" through mindfulness and compassion.
This involves recognizing our essential goodness, meeting ourselves with unconditional friendliness and curiosity, extending compassion to ourselves and others, and practicing forgiveness.
"our imperfections don't taint our basic goodness"
Nevertheless it contains a few helpful takeaways and I like that the author gives credit to Buddhist teachings rather than repackaging and selling mindfulness and various meditation exercises as her own invention which so often happens in the self-help space.
Brock describes radical acceptance as "the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is" through mindfulness and compassion.
This involves recognizing our essential goodness, meeting ourselves with unconditional friendliness and curiosity, extending compassion to ourselves and others, and practicing forgiveness.
"our imperfections don't taint our basic goodness"
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Addiction, Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Miscarriage, Animal death, Child abuse, and Religious bigotry
Minor: Fatphobia
spacekee's review against another edition
Around 10% of the way in, there is a description of a moment of public shaming in a highly abusive manner, with no warning. Specifically, The author is shamed for "killing her baby" due to miscarriage, used as a lesson about overwork . I personally found this quite triggering and decided that now is not an appropriate time for me to continue this book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Miscarriage and Emotional abuse
erinwolf1997's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death and Miscarriage
Moderate: Eating disorder and Child abuse
Minor: Incest
darumachan's review against another edition
slow-paced
1.5
I picked this up because I use the Calm meditation app, and Brach's meditations have been some of my favorites.
The good: Each chapter has a key term or concept that is directly relevant to a meditation practice, and likewise, each chapter concludes with one or more suggestions for guided meditation. I definitely noticed some overlap with Brach's meditations on Calm, as well as the meaningful influence she has had as a teacher and mentor on Tamara Levitt. But in the end, the chapters go into each topic in more depth and add to the meditations, so the app and the book do work together well.
The frustrating: The book was published in 2003, and has not aged well. Brach relates many (MANY) of her own personal experiences throughout, and I've come away with a fairly ambivalent image of her as self-congratulatory, white-savior-ish, heedless of cultural appropriation, thoughtlessly generalizing "Asian" as a monolithic culture, and entirely unaware of (or unconcerned with) the issues of systemic racism that any BIPOC living in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century might face. I preface all of that with the original publication date because I recognize that these social issues were not as forefront in the minds of most white writers in the 90s and early 2000s. But... it has been 2 decades, and if there is truly as much continuity between the teachings in the book and the core principles that she continues to teach in contemporary media (apps and podcasts, etc.), then it is worth her time to come back and create a 2nd edition of this book.
**Also, a note about the audiobook-- it is straight up a copy from the original made for a CD -- to the extent that halfway through the book, there is a break that says "This is the end of the CD but not the audiobook; continue on the next disc." In fact, let's just call this technical goof a metaphor for the problems with her tone and social awareness -- it's just coming to us directly from the previous century with no updates whatsoever.
The bad: Besides the topical introduction and concluding meditation, each chapter was little more than a series of anecdotes that were intended to illustrate the problem and how she solves them. There was the occasional lesson-tale from the teachings of the Buddha, which have been clearly used as illustrative anecdotes for millennia, and those were the most useful and least problematic. Besides that, I did not find anything really useful in these anecdotes and in many cases, they did not ring even remotely true. First, there are her own personal life experiences, and the first few seemed genuine in their rawness, but after a while the way she characterized her "learning self" against her "accepting self" started to feel exaggerated and unbelievable (either that or she really does frequently shift seamlessly from "screaming" at her family members to connecting deeply with her colleagues at meditation retreats? I'm not sure which is more troubling). Then, there are the examples of her friends and clients, and fine, this is standard fare for books like this, but their situations were so extreme, Brach's advice so profound and moving, and their resulting transformations so sudden and life-altering, that it all rang false, or at least highly simplified and condescending both to the subject and to the reader. Most egregious were the anonymous and generic "real-life stories" -- the priest comforting a woman on her deathbed -- or literally her describing the equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon in order to illustrate a point, but doing so as if it were a story that had actually happened -- essentially early versions of the clunky internet memes that are trying so hard to teach a lesson but are completely and transparently fabricated.
The downright problematic: More ranting about the anecdotes, but this is important -- every time I picked up the book, I came away feeling quite triggered because of how casually she would use horrific and extreme situations to embellish these ridiculous anecdotes. In her personal life stories: the miscarriage of her first pregnancy; mental and emotional abuse in a cult-like religious group; growing up with abusive and addicted parents; losing a beloved pet to terminal illness. The anecdotes about her friends and clients involved trauma like sexual abuse of a minor, other types of physical and emotional abuse by parents and/or partners, severe cases of religious bigotry, eating disorders, grieving, illness, and addiction. Again, the meme-type anecdotes are the worst because she blithely embellishes them with extreme and sensationally traumatic details like "holocaust survivors" and "heroine addicts" and people wasting away with any number of severe and terminal illnesses (there were at least two instances of "emaciated faces" looking up from hospital beds).
Finally, the language she uses is just careless and problematic -- casual racism, cultural appropriation, fatphobia, addiction, and food restriction. Again, probably more an issue of the book not aging well, but all the more reason to update it as a new edition that reflects the actual concerns and values of our society.
The good: Each chapter has a key term or concept that is directly relevant to a meditation practice, and likewise, each chapter concludes with one or more suggestions for guided meditation. I definitely noticed some overlap with Brach's meditations on Calm, as well as the meaningful influence she has had as a teacher and mentor on Tamara Levitt. But in the end, the chapters go into each topic in more depth and add to the meditations, so the app and the book do work together well.
The frustrating: The book was published in 2003, and has not aged well. Brach relates many (MANY) of her own personal experiences throughout, and I've come away with a fairly ambivalent image of her as self-congratulatory, white-savior-ish, heedless of cultural appropriation, thoughtlessly generalizing "Asian" as a monolithic culture, and entirely unaware of (or unconcerned with) the issues of systemic racism that any BIPOC living in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century might face. I preface all of that with the original publication date because I recognize that these social issues were not as forefront in the minds of most white writers in the 90s and early 2000s. But... it has been 2 decades, and if there is truly as much continuity between the teachings in the book and the core principles that she continues to teach in contemporary media (apps and podcasts, etc.), then it is worth her time to come back and create a 2nd edition of this book.
**Also, a note about the audiobook-- it is straight up a copy from the original made for a CD -- to the extent that halfway through the book, there is a break that says "This is the end of the CD but not the audiobook; continue on the next disc." In fact, let's just call this technical goof a metaphor for the problems with her tone and social awareness -- it's just coming to us directly from the previous century with no updates whatsoever.
The bad: Besides the topical introduction and concluding meditation, each chapter was little more than a series of anecdotes that were intended to illustrate the problem and how she solves them. There was the occasional lesson-tale from the teachings of the Buddha, which have been clearly used as illustrative anecdotes for millennia, and those were the most useful and least problematic. Besides that, I did not find anything really useful in these anecdotes and in many cases, they did not ring even remotely true. First, there are her own personal life experiences, and the first few seemed genuine in their rawness, but after a while the way she characterized her "learning self" against her "accepting self" started to feel exaggerated and unbelievable (either that or she really does frequently shift seamlessly from "screaming" at her family members to connecting deeply with her colleagues at meditation retreats? I'm not sure which is more troubling). Then, there are the examples of her friends and clients, and fine, this is standard fare for books like this, but their situations were so extreme, Brach's advice so profound and moving, and their resulting transformations so sudden and life-altering, that it all rang false, or at least highly simplified and condescending both to the subject and to the reader. Most egregious were the anonymous and generic "real-life stories" -- the priest comforting a woman on her deathbed -- or literally her describing the equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon in order to illustrate a point, but doing so as if it were a story that had actually happened -- essentially early versions of the clunky internet memes that are trying so hard to teach a lesson but are completely and transparently fabricated.
The downright problematic: More ranting about the anecdotes, but this is important -- every time I picked up the book, I came away feeling quite triggered because of how casually she would use horrific and extreme situations to embellish these ridiculous anecdotes. In her personal life stories: the miscarriage of her first pregnancy; mental and emotional abuse in a cult-like religious group; growing up with abusive and addicted parents; losing a beloved pet to terminal illness. The anecdotes about her friends and clients involved trauma like sexual abuse of a minor, other types of physical and emotional abuse by parents and/or partners, severe cases of religious bigotry, eating disorders, grieving, illness, and addiction. Again, the meme-type anecdotes are the worst because she blithely embellishes them with extreme and sensationally traumatic details like "holocaust survivors" and "heroine addicts" and people wasting away with any number of severe and terminal illnesses (there were at least two instances of "emaciated faces" looking up from hospital beds).
Finally, the language she uses is just careless and problematic -- casual racism, cultural appropriation, fatphobia, addiction, and food restriction. Again, probably more an issue of the book not aging well, but all the more reason to update it as a new edition that reflects the actual concerns and values of our society.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Cultural appropriation, Cancer, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma, Grief, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, Miscarriage, Fatphobia, Death of parent, Colonisation, Bullying, Terminal illness, Eating disorder, Alcoholism, Addiction, Ableism, Animal death, Drug abuse, Suicide attempt, Abandonment, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual assault, Rape, Medical content, Infertility, Religious bigotry, Drug use, Chronic illness, Body shaming, and Emotional abuse
bluejayreads's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
This isn't a bad book. Not at all, actually. It's just very repetitive.
I was really engaged through the first few chapters. Tara talks about her own personal spiritual journey and how she came to Buddhism, and the basic principles of radical acceptance. (The main idea is that emotions or desires you don't like don't mean you're a bad person, and instead of resisting them, sit with them and accept that you are feeling them. It sounds silly when I say it like that but she does a much better job of explaining it.) She also has examples of using radical acceptance herself and helping her therapy clients use it to deal with difficult things.
But it never really goes beyond that. I felt like I got a pretty good understanding of it sometime around chapter four or five, and after that it started to feel repetitive. The issues that her clients were working through were different, but the principle was the same. Pause, breathe, accept that the feeling or desire is there, remember that having it doesn't make you a bad person, and whatever you decide to do from there do it mindfully. At some point I was like, "Okay, I get it and I'm definitely going to use this myself, but can we get on with it?"
I'm not saying this book is bad. On the contrary, the first few chapters are excellent and I am definitely going to work on using this in my own life. But it started to get boring after a while with example after example that didn't teach me anything new. A good book, but I think it should be at least 30% shorter.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder
Moderate: Child abuse, Sexual assault, and Miscarriage
There are no specific eating disorders in the book, but some of the content in chapter 6 will be very triggering to someone with an eating disorder.
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