Radical Acceptance Quotes

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.”
― Tara Brach

“While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched, our chest sunken. Rather than a temporary reaction to danger, we develop a permanent suit of armor. We become, as Chogyam Trungpa puts it, “a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.” We often don’t even recognize this armor because it feels like such a familiar part of who we are. But we can see it in others. And when we are meditating, we can feel it in ourselves—the tightness, the areas where we feel nothing.”
― Tara Brach

“It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Acceptance is the only way out of hell.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

“Radical acceptance of the injustice is part of this process-it not fair, I cannot change it; I can, however, chart a different and authentic course forward and learn from this. Be kind to yourself, take a breath or a rest, and recognize that with time your growth and healing will supplant this injustice, but for now it needs to be grieved.”
― Ramani Durvasula, It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People

“Even when emotions seem to overtake life, such as when we are depressed or anxious or angry, it is important to remember that those emotions still give us important information. Rather than judging our emotions, practice acceptance of them and open your mind to their messages. Rejecting emotions or trying to push them away usually intensifies them. If the message is not heard, it needs to get louder. As an example, invalidation by others tends to intensify emotions, and self-invalidation has the same effect.”
― Lane Pederson, DBT Skills Training for Integrated Dual Disorder Treatment Settings

“How do we be with the paradoxes our people bring? We can align with one side of the conundrum and dismiss the other in an effort to relieve the unsettling experience that the logically unresolvable contradiction brings to us and our people. However, if we do this, we are stepping away from our person's experience because he or she is living inside the paradox and can't move away. Staying present asks us to hold the full paradox within our own minds and bodies, to enter the suffering that entails. If we are able to do this and remain in a ventral state, it seems that something happens and we may be able to enter a state in which the paradox begins to reveal its value a little differently than ever before ... As we settled into this broader acceptance together, I believe we made room for the possibility of the arrival of a resolving third thing in its own time.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“To unmask is to lay bare a proud face of noncompliance, to refuse to be silenced, to stop being compartmentalized and hidden away, and to stand powerfully in our wholeness alongside other disabled and marginalized folks. Together we can stand strong and free, shielded by the powerful, radical acceptance that comes only when we know who we are, and with the recognition that we never had anything to hide.”
― Devon Price PhD, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“I find acceptance to be the key that unlocked my mental cage, freeing me from the mental and emotional suffering I've been carrying for years.”
― Ava Walters, The Radical Acceptance Workbook: Transform Your Life & Free Your Mind with the Healing Power of Self-Love & Compassion - Positive Lessons to Treat Anxiety, ... Self-Judgement

“One of the most powerful paths to personal peace is learning to live outside of the persistent push from the voice of perfectionism.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones, Giants At Play: Finding Wisdom, Courage, And Acceptance To Encounter Your Destiny

“Hear me out. The idea of 'radical acceptance' is that sometimes in order to reduce suffering, you have to stop fighting the situation and do the counterintuitive thing. Wholeheartedly embrace reality, spiky bits and all.”
― Mishell Baker, Phantom Pains

“Radically accept, release and allow suffering to move through you like a passing storm.”
― Lisa Cypers Kamen, Are We Happy Yet?: Eight Keys to Unlocking a Joyful Life

“She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.
She imaged accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other.

When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us.

When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division.

Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim.

Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us.

The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.”
― Gareth Gwyn, You Are Us: How to Build Bridges in a Polarized World

“Sometimes we forget about our problems and find the focus and clarity of everything in this moment that makes our problems disappear.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“If I ever had to ask for it, I don't want it anymore....sincerely.”
― Kierra C.T. Banks

“Chuck it in the duckit bucket.”
― Nadine Dalton, Pineapple Pirates of the Caribbean: Part One

“how might I
recognize myself
as medicine
instead of messiness?”
― Joy Donnell, Show Us Your Fire

“I remember saying to some of my fellow students, 'Does anyone want a coffee?' They all shook their heads and asked me to rephrase my question to reflect my real feelings. So I had to feel and think and then I came up with, 'I want coffee and I want you to come with me.' Having tried it, I found I really liked this process of turning a ritualized question into a statement, and I still try to do this when I remember.”
― Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane