This book is a bit hard for me to review. Once again, I listened to it as an audiobook, except I did it while doing delivery driving. So my mind was potentially distracted and I had to pause it a whole bunch. I also have a few mixed feelings on it.
To start with, the author Tara Brach seems a bit off to me. She’s the type of person who basically belonged to a Buddhist cult at one point in her life and is still an avid practitioner. It took a complete asshole of a spiritual leader to open her eyes enough to leave the cult, but she didn’t leave the nonsense behind. This book is pushing Buddhism and not just the practical parts of it, but also a lot of the spiritual stuff associated with it.
Having said that, I do think Buddhism has some practical wisdom to impart. Even as a non-religious man, I can see value in Buddhism and this book brings some of it to the forefront. The book has some nice concepts that are quite simple, like taking a “pause”. Just stop and feel what you’re feeling. Yes. Good advice and a lot of people would benefit from it rather than being reactive assholes. I probably could have prevented a few of my more shameful moments in life by taking a pause first.
Another interesting concept is the idea of inviting in your negative thoughts. Don’t pretend they don’t exist and don’t try to block them out. Accept that you have them. I had seen this concept before in another book where it recommended giving your negative thoughts a name and then saying “hello (name)” to it when it comes. Radical Acceptance goes much deeper into that concept and I thought had reasonably practical advice on it.
As the book moves on, it does tend to get a bit repetitive as the author goes through a few cases of people she’s helped as a Psychologist over the years. The advice tends to be pretty similar and so a lot of the chapters start to sound very similar, but it could be useful for someone to get some concrete examples. Of course, there is an assumption that she’s not just making up these stories. Some of the comments that her clients made didn’t seem real to me. A lot of them fit a little too neatly into her philosophy and I’d suspect that she’s at least simplifying if not outright fabricating the stories.
Still, there are little useful nuggets even in the later chapters.
Overall, I’d recommend the book, but with some caveats. You need to be at least tolerant of spiritual nonsense to get to the real useful meat of the book and you need to accept that the author bought into Buddhism a lot too much. However, unlike The Power of Now author, I don’t think she’s trying to start a cult of her own. At least not too dangerous of one.