Spirituality

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha Tara Brach, 2003 Executive Summary Tara Brach is a psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher, and Radical Acceptance is the product of both disciplines brought to bear on a single diagnosis: that the central wound of contemporary Western life is the belief that we are fundamentally not enough. Not good enough, not calm enough, not successful enough, not spiritually advanced enough. This belief — what Brach calls the “trance of unworthiness” — drives most of the compulsive, avoidant, and self-destructive behavior she observed in twenty years of clinical and contemplative practice. The thesis: the path out is not self-improvement but self-acceptance, and self-acceptance is not complacency — it is the prerequisite for genuine change. ...

The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle, 1997 Executive Summary Eckhart Tolle’s central argument is simpler than the spiritual vocabulary around it suggests: most human suffering is generated by the mind’s habit of living in the past (guilt, regret, rumination) or the future (anxiety, anticipation, dread) rather than in the present moment, which is the only place life actually occurs. The thesis: the present moment is all you ever have, and the resistance to it is the source of most psychological pain. The book’s packaging is spiritual; the core insight is empirically defensible and largely confirmed by contemporary psychology. ...