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A review by icecurtain
Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield
3.0
I am an avid bookworm. I go through dozens of books each year, as well as a significant amount of podcasts. I try very hard to almost never abandon a book before completing it, but when I crank playback speed up to triple speed and repeatedly check to see how much of the audiobook is left, I know it isn't gripping me.
The author mixes sporadic, useful psychotherapy tips with a heavily religious approach towards Buddhism. She comes off as highly credulous and pretty "woo-woo". She starts off by telling us how she got involved in a meditation cult where the leader emotionally abused her, told her who to marry, and then publicly shamed her when she has a miscarriage, telling her that it was her fault. Then she left that cult and went on to other buddhist institutions and extended meditation retreats.
She mentions hypnosis in exactly one place in the book. Hypnosis is a real, well-proven phenomenon. The American Psychology Association has an entire division (Division 30) for hypnosis studies. I myself am a certified hypnotist. But she dives into it with absolutely no explanation, taking a pretty extreme example that will sound incredibly weird and off-putting to almost anyone new with hypnosis. Her exampe seemed highly exaggerated, or at least edited, for coherence and drama. If you do listen to this and are nonplussed by that segment, please ignore everything she says and do your own research on hypnosis.
As for the concept of "radical acceptance," she talks about how people tend to misunderstand what that means, but doesn't do a good job of defining what it does mean. She doesn't even provide examples to explain the concept of radical acceptance--only examples of common, poorly thought out arguments against it.
There may be a few acceptable bits here and there. Empathy is good. Meditation is good. Pausing before responding to things people say that bother you is good. But as a whole, it's hard to recommend this for anyone but die-hard Buddhist fans. There must be much better works to introduce people to the mindset.
The author mixes sporadic, useful psychotherapy tips with a heavily religious approach towards Buddhism. She comes off as highly credulous and pretty "woo-woo". She starts off by telling us how she got involved in a meditation cult where the leader emotionally abused her, told her who to marry, and then publicly shamed her when she has a miscarriage, telling her that it was her fault. Then she left that cult and went on to other buddhist institutions and extended meditation retreats.
She mentions hypnosis in exactly one place in the book. Hypnosis is a real, well-proven phenomenon. The American Psychology Association has an entire division (Division 30) for hypnosis studies. I myself am a certified hypnotist. But she dives into it with absolutely no explanation, taking a pretty extreme example that will sound incredibly weird and off-putting to almost anyone new with hypnosis. Her exampe seemed highly exaggerated, or at least edited, for coherence and drama. If you do listen to this and are nonplussed by that segment, please ignore everything she says and do your own research on hypnosis.
As for the concept of "radical acceptance," she talks about how people tend to misunderstand what that means, but doesn't do a good job of defining what it does mean. She doesn't even provide examples to explain the concept of radical acceptance--only examples of common, poorly thought out arguments against it.
There may be a few acceptable bits here and there. Empathy is good. Meditation is good. Pausing before responding to things people say that bother you is good. But as a whole, it's hard to recommend this for anyone but die-hard Buddhist fans. There must be much better works to introduce people to the mindset.