Radical Self Acceptance Quotes

I found myself praying: "May I love and accept myself just as I am.

But this revolutionary act of treating ourselves tenderly can begin to undo the aversive messages of a lifetime.

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

The gospel of justifying faith means that while Christians are, in themselves still sinful and sinning, yet in Christ, in God’s sight, they are accepted and righteous. So we can say that we are more wicked than we ever dared believe, but more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared hope — at the very same time. This creates a radical new dynamic for personal growth. It means that the more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you. But on the other hand, the more aware you are of God’s grace and acceptance in Christ, the more able you are to drop your denials and self-defenses and admit the true dimensions and character of your sin.

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.

Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.

Concepts like self-acceptance and body neutrality are not without value. When you have spent your entire life at war with your body, these models offer a truce. But you can have more than a cease-fire. You can have radical self-love because you are already radical self-love.

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.

As I noticed feelings and thoughts appear and disappear, it became increasingly clear that they were just coming and going on their own. . . . There was no sense of a self owning them.

Too often, self-acceptance is used as a synonym for acquiescence. We accept the things we cannot change.

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.

We practice self-acceptance when we have grown tired of self-hatred but can’t conceive of anything beyond a paltry tolerance of ourselves.

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth. Anger is the demand of accountability, It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It's a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It's a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope. How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun. In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.

In this culture, cultivating unconditional self-acceptance truly is radical.

Most of the time Marilyn's mother remained unconscious, her breath labored and erratic. One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. "You know," she whispered softly, "all my life I thought something was wrong with me." Shaking her head slightly, as if to say, "What a waste," she closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma.

It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they're not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis.

Sometimes we are late bloomers because the world needs to catch up to us.

When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don’t need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that “I am what I am what I am,” then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom (Galatians 5:1). We do not know how to stand there on our own. Someone Else needs to sustain us in such a deep and spacious place. This is what the saints mean by our emptiness, our poverty and our nothingness. They are not being negative or self-effacing, but just utterly honest about their inner experience. God alone can sustain me in knowing and accepting that I am not a saint, not at all perfect, not very loving at all—and in that very recognition I can fall into the perfect love of God. Remember Jesus’ first beatitude: “How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of God” (Matthew 5:3). How amazing is that? I think this might just be the description of salvation and perfect freedom. They are the same, you know.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and is, therefore, endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. -Sufi poetry

The danger of externalizing one’s self-worth is that you’ve given over control of how you feel about yourself to forces beyond your control.

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

Our disconnection, trauma, lack of resources, lack of compassion, fear, greed, and ego are the sources of our contributions to human suffering, not our bodies. We can accept humans and their bodies without understanding “why” they love, think, move, or look the way they do. Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

A massive and essential part of self-love is forgiveness and acceptance. So while you’re making an effort and striving to be the best person you can be, at the same time you need to recognize your own humanity. Try not to hold yourself to impeccable standards, and just do the best you can right now.

Being witnessed is essential to our humanity, our growth, and our ability to move past the trauma that we have survived. If astrology does its job, it offers a mirror in which we see both our best selves and our growth edges.

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

To the extent that you actually realize that you are not, for example, your anxieties, then your anxieties no longer threaten you. Even if anxiety is present, it no longer overwhelms you because you are no longer exclusively tied to it. You are no longer courting it, fighting it, resisting it, or running from it. In the most radical fashion, anxiety is thoroughly accepted as it is and allowed to move as it will. You have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, by its presence or absence, for you are simply watching it pass by. Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to dis-identify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you--since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them. Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification "therapy," you may find that your entire individual self (persona, ego, centaur), which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self—your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts—is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance. Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them. Because you are willing to witness them, to look at them impartially, you are able to transcend them. As St. Thomas put it, "Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature." Thus, if the eye were colored red, it wouldn't be able to perceive red objects. It can see red because it is clear, or "redless." Likewise, if we can but watch or witness our distresses, we prove ourselves thereby to be "distress-less," free of the witnessed turmoil. That within which feels pain is itself pain-less; that which feels fear is fear-less; that which perceives tension is tensionless. To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.

No intelligent radical can fail to realize the need of the rational education of the young. The rearing of the child must become a process of liberation by methods which shall not impose ready-made ideas, but which should aid the child's natural self-unfoldment. The purpose of such an education is not to force the child's adaptation to accepted concepts. but to give free play to his [and her] originality, initiative, and individuality. Only by freeing education from compulsion and restraint can we create the environment for the manifestation of the spontaneous interest and inner incentives on the part of the child. Only thus can we supply rational conditions favorable to the development of the child's natural tendencies and his latent emotional and mental faculties. Such methods of education, essentially aiding the child's imitative quality and ardor for knowledge, will develop a generation of healthy intellectual independence. It will produce men and women capable, in the words of Francisco Ferrer, “of evolving without stopping, of destroying and renewing their environment without cessation; of renewing themselves also; always ready to accept what is best, happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives in one life.

Radical self-love invites us to love our bodies in a way that transforms how we understand and accept the bodies of others. This is not to say that we magically like everyone. It simply means we have debates and disagreements about ideas and character, not about bodies.

I became committed to dropping my resistance so I could get to know this energy that was driving the wanting self.

When we give our chart, or anything or anyone in our life, too much power, we lose contact with our agency. Try to come at your chart with an investigative and optimistic autonomy.

Through the simple practice of seeing our own goodness, we undo the deeply rooted habits of blame and self-hate that keep us feeling isolated and unworthy.

Do what you have to do. Make doing what you have to do a priority for your life, because if you don't, you leave yourself behind. You do not have to prostrate yourself at the feet of shame for one more minute or keep begging for forgiveness for being yourself. We need you. We need you to stop waiting to be ready. To stop waiting to act until you become the self you imagine you would be if only you were different than you are. We need your radical truth-telling, your willingness to speak from your heart, but most of all, we need the unrepeatable essence of you. Come back.

But why do we have to be all radical about it?” To answer this question is to further distinguish radical self-love from its fickle cousins, self-confidence and self-esteem, or its scrappy kid sister, self-acceptance.

Knowing who we are, what we want, and being able to express our needs, wants, and desires - so that we can find others to share them - makes us poor targets for capitalism, because we can now access intimacy in many ways, with several beings, and even by ourselves. This type of knowing is rooted in radical self-care, an acceptance of interdependence, and radical self-love.

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.

The road to better mental health is a long and difficult one. You will stumble and fall. You will slip up in a thousand little ways, daily. You will fall backward into old, destructive patterns, again and again and again. And if you treat every one of those setbacks as a personal failure, you will never make it. The only way forward is to get back up, dust yourself off, and move forward again. The only way to do that is to accept yourself as less than perfect. And the only way to do that is to have grace.

Your truth matters. Your feelings are valid. Your experiences hold significance. Your trauma deserves attention. Please don't let anyone undermine your reality or your voice because you have the absolute right to experience and express your feelings without judgment or dismissal. Embrace your truth and honor your journey no matter how long it takes.

Radical self-acceptance is being okay with turning down things that don’t work for you.

I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance.

the highest form of repentence is self-acceptance.

One of the most powerful paths to personal peace is learning to live outside of the persistent push from the voice of perfectionism.

make love of your self perfect.

Healing is an ongoing process, and it’s never done. From a motivational or an attitudinal standpoint, you come at yourself a lot differently if you’re trying to heal than if you’re wanting to fix. To the extent that you are applying more grace and more empathy and more love to yourself as you are navigating behavioral patterns in your life, you are healing more than fixing. Healing is acceptance—radical acceptance. It’s being patient with yourself and not berating yourself up over unmet expectations, either yours or other people’s, and not basing your worth on external validation.

Silence is one of the major contributing factors to people feeling inescapably stuck in their depression, their anxiety, their stress, their fear, their shame. If you’re suffering in silence, you’re not going to find a solution for it, because nobody knows. And we are not capable of getting ourselves out of a lot of these issues that we are facing, mentally and emotionally, particularly in today’s society, by ourselves. We need help. We need each other. We need commmunity. We need a tribe. We need family.

Let's use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. Let's use our erasure from this rotten-to-the-core Western notion of humanity to build up a different “new world,” one that is not defined in terms of dichotomies or hierarchies or emotional death—but centered on love: one in which we accept ambiguity and difference, grounded in an expansive, limitless “we.” We are at the center of a radical shift taking place in pro-animal discourse precisely because, upon self-reflection, we can see that our struggle is their struggle. I don't mean this symbolically. I mean this literally.

With journaling, you see the patterns of your life; you claim—or reclaim—who you really are; you coach yourself into becoming the someone you imagined; you arrive at a sense of balance, of yourself, of wholeness. You can discover productive patterns and nonproductive patterns in your life, and you can choose to embrace the ones that move you forward.

the 'secret' of a spiritual life is the capacity to '...return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment -- if even it is a feeling of being humilated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.' Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.

The wisdom teachings that permeate this book revolve around the truth that radically honest, compassionate self-exploration leads to self-awareness, and that true self-awareness is always healing. It opens us to the naturalness of love, peace, joy, and our own boundless creativity. Love, and especially self-love and acceptance, is the greatest healing force that I have gleaned thus far.

29. Radical acceptance also means not overlooking another important truth - the endless creativity and possibility that exist in living. By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life would unfold, we open ourselves to hope, so that we can move forward with vitality and will. “Radical Acceptance, Ch 2 Awakening form the Trance: The Path of Radical Acceptance”.

History may be a nightmare—an endless cycle of violence and oppression. Old victims of domination soon became new perpetrators of domination. We have seen this cycle over and over again: American revolutionaries dominating Indigenous peoples and defending slavery, anti-colonial heroes becoming dictators, anti-racists supporting patriarchy and homophobia, liberals crusading for imperial invasion and occupation. Such a nightmare radically calls into question the power of radical love in human history. For King, if we accept such a nightmare, then only self-destruction awaits us. To dream is to hold death at arm’s length. To love is to really be alive in history. Without radical love, nihilism triumphs—“power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”1

We all have the opportunity to radically reinvent and reimagine the process of aging for ourselves. And I don’t mean merely doing more or doing differently. I don’t use “reinvention” in the way that many experts do—from the outside in. That’s the topic of most books about aging. Rather, my emphasis is on the internal, less familiar terrain of soul—those subtle yearnings that appear in images and fantasies, the ways we respond or fear to respond to those messengers, and the symbolic meanings we glean from them. As we learn the psychological and spiritual practices in this book, we discover how to orient to our inner worlds, deepen our self-knowledge, and reimagine age for ourselves, eventually shifting from denial to awareness, from self-rejection to self-acceptance, from obligation to flow, from holding on to letting go, from distraction to presence. Even from role to soul. The result: a newfound freedom from the constraints of past roles and identities, an emerging sense of becoming who you were always meant to be, and a profound gratitude for the way that your life unfolded.

Self-love is putting on your oxygen mask before helping anybody else. When you struggle with loving yourself, then you really struggle with allowing someone else to love you because you don’t think you’re deserving of it. You don’t even know that you’re doing that, but you are. So love yourself and go use what you have to be a conduit of love and light and life, and know that if you do, when you are finally extinguished and your time here is through, you will have done your part in this snap of a finger that is your lifespan on this miracle of a fucking planet.

This divide is characterized by the demonization and privatization of public services, including schools, the military, prisons, and even policing; by the growing use of prison as our primary resolution for social contradictions; by the degradation and even debasement of the public sphere and all those who would seek to democratically occupy it; by an almost complete abandonment of the welfare state; by a nearly religious reverence for marketized solutions to public problems; by the growth of a consumer culture that repeatedly emphasizes the satisfaction of the self over the needs of the community; by the corruption of democracy by money and by monied interests, what Henry Giroux refers to as “totalitarianism with elections”;88 by the mockery of a judicial process already tipped in favor of the powerful; by the militarization of the police; by the acceptance of massive global inequality; by the erasure of those unconnected to the Internet-driven modern economy; by the loss of faith in the very notion of community; and by the shrinking presence of the radical voices, values, and vision necessary to resist this dark neoliberal moment.89

The most radical approach to resistance is acceptance--and acceptance does not mean accepting the world as it is. It means accepting our pain as it is. If we refuse to accept our pain, then we're just trying to make ourselves feel better--and when our hidden motive is to make ourselves feel better, there is no limit to the damage we can do in the name of justice. Great leaders never combine a call for justice with a cry for vengeance. Leaders who can master their pain have taken self-interest off the agenda, so their voice rings with moral power. They are no longer speaking their truth. They are speaking truth.

Indigenous cultures around the world have long accepted the concept of “two-spirit” people: those who embody both feminine and masculine identities or whose gender is more complicated than one of two options.12 There were periods of time in history when the constructs of race looked considerably different. Irish folks were not enfolded into Whiteness when they arrived in America; neither were the Polish or Italians.13 These elements of our identities are socially constructed and transmitted through a multitude of vehicles, including family, community, and culture. But no vehicle has been as potent in shaping our perceptions of bodies on a global scale as the vehicle of media.

Survival and persistence, sung defiantly in the high notes of the diva, are no small feats in a world that wishes fervently for one's nonexistence and/or silent complicity in one's own exploitation. The narcissistic self-regard implied in the negative definition of the diva is a radical insistence on self-love when no one else loves you, when you are not, according to social norms, worthy of being loved at all, but only of being desired in a way that uses you up or consumes you. To say that diva citizenship cannot change the world is to accept a meaning of "the world" that aligns it only with the privileged. An investigation of the real function of diva citizenship has to start by asking who these acts are for, and whether the very fact of having something for herself can change a person, who might then go on to change the world just by surviving in it for one more day.

The phrase “self-love” misleads us when we imagine that searching for it would mean striving to acquire a conceited pompous view of ourselves. True release from self-loathing tends to be a great deal more modest: we are only after a sane, fair, and more accurate perspective on our ordinary earthly nature. We can with kindness and good humour accept that being silly is entirely normal, wasting opportunities is universal, average sexuality is to be expected. Self-love shouldn’t be predicated on the competitive idea that we must pull off extraordinary feats of courage or intelligence. True love is only ever the compassion of the fallen for the fallen, it’s the search by one radically imperfect being to express their tenderness at the sight of the struggles and pains of another. We should – henceforth – allow ourselves enough self-love to be able to endure a little kindness.

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

There had been moments when it seemed as though from the ferment of radical ideas a culture might emerge which might be different both from the traditional aristocratic culture and from the bourgeois culture of the protestant ethic which replaced it. We can discern shadows of what this counter culture might have been like. rejecting private property for communism, religion for rationalistic and materialistic pantheism, the mechanical philosophy for dialectical science, asceticism for unashamed enjoyment of the good things of the flesh, it might have achieved unity through a federation of communities, each based on the fullest respect for the individual. Its ideal would have been economic self-sufficiency, not world trade or world domination. The economic significant consequence of the Puritan emphasis on sin was the compulsion on labour, to save, to accumulate, which contributed so much to making the Industrial Revolution possible in England. Ranters simply rejected this; Quakers ultimately came to accept it. Only Winstanley put forward an alternative....... ...It came nearest to realisation in the Digger communities, which might have given the counter-culture some economic base.

You already know what you know, after all—and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough. You remain threatened by disease, and self-deception, and unhappiness, and malevolence, and betrayal, and corruption, and pain, and limitation. You are subject to all these things, in the final analysis, because you are just too ignorant to protect yourself. If you just knew enough, you could be healthier and more honest. You would suffer less. You could recognize, resist and even triumph over malevolence and evil. You would neither betray a friend, nor deal falsely and deceitfully in business, politics or love. However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect nor kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition—radically, fatally insufficient. You must accept this before you can converse philosophically, instead of convincing, oppressing, dominating or even amusing. You must accept this before you can tolerate a conversation where the Word that eternally mediates between order and chaos is operating, psychologically speaking. To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions (and, perhaps, they must have done the work tha justifies this assumption). You must believe that if they shared their conclusions with you, you could bypass at least some of the pain of personally learning the same things (as learning from the experience of others can be quicker and much less dangerous). You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness. But if you are meditating as you converse, then you listen to the other person, and say the new and original things that can rise from deep within of their own accord. It’s as if you are listening to yourself during such a conversation, just as you are listening to the other person. You are describing how you are responding to the new information imparted by the speaker. You are reporting what that information has done to you—what new things it made appear within you, how it has changed your presuppositions, how it has made you think of new questions. You tell the speaker these things, directly. Then they have the same effect on him. In this manner, you both move towards somewhere newer and broader and better. You both change, as you let your old presuppositions die—as you shed your skins and emerge renewed. A conversation such as this is one where it is the desire for truth itself—on the part of both participants—that is truly listening and speaking. That’s why it’s engaging, vital, interesting and meaningful. That sense of meaning is a signal from the deep, ancient parts of your Being. You’re where you should be, with one foot in order, and the other tentatively extended into chaos and the unknown. You’re immersed in the Tao, following the great Way of Life. There, you’re stable enough to be secure, but flexible enough to transform. There, you’re allowing new information to inform you—to permeate your stability, to repair and improve its structure, and expand its domain. There the constituent elements of your Being can find their more elegant formation. A conversation like that places you in the same place that listening to great music places you, and for much the same reason. A conversation like that puts you in the realm where souls connect, and that’s a real place. It leaves you thinking, “That was really worthwhile. We really got to know each other.” The masks came off, and the searchers were revealed. So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.

A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.

I rail a lot against passion, because I feel like passion can be very exclusionary, and very elitist, and it can leave a lot of people feeling like they don't belong... I'm much more interested in allowing people to follow curiosity, which is a much more gentle impulse that doesn't require that you sacrifice your entire life for something. It's more of kind of a scavenger hunt, where you're allowed to pick up these tiny beautiful little clues along the pathway. It's more of a tap on the shoulder that asks you to turn your attention one inch to the left. Oh that's a little bit mildly interesting - what is that? Okay now I'm going to take that clue... I'm going to take it another inch, and I'm going to take it another inch. Rather than this idea that the symphony is born whole, because you sit down and you're struck by lightening and then you start to create. Curiosity I think, is a far more friendly way to do creativity than passion." ...this is why I say the path of curiosity is the scavenger hunt, because it took my probably three years between "gee it would be nice to put some plants in my backyard" to here I am in the South Pacific exploring the history of moss and inventing this giant novel. You know I think everybody thinks that creativity comes in lightening strikes, but I think it comes with whispers. And then the whispers can grow thunderous over time if you are patient enough to explore it, almost in the way that a scientist would. Be open to - you don't need to know why you are interested in this, it will be revealed if you continue to investigate. That's all that curiosity asks of you. Passion asks you to throw it all in the bonfire. And curiosity is way more generous in that it just says - give me a little bit of your time and let's see what we can do. Fear is part of our make-up, it's something that's inherent in us, it's a protective device. My experience with fear is to permit it to exist and then to figure out how to work with it. And to me working with fear is what courage is. I've never started any project that I wasn't afraid... during the entire thing.And the conversation that I have with fear is not to say you are the death of creativity and I can't be creative because you exist, but rather to say: "You are part of the family of my consciousness. You are one of the emotions that I possess and I hear your complaint. I see your anxiety and I see everything you are putting before me about how this is going to be a disaster, and how I'm going to die and how everyone's going to mock me and how I'm going to fail... and I thank you so much for your contribution, but your sister creativity and I are going to go off on this journey now and do this thing but you are allowed to be in the car. We're going on a road trip, but I don't expect you to not come." And once you allow fear to just be present it seems to quiet down and go to sleep and then you can go about your work. But it's never out of the picture and I don't waste my energy trying to kick it out of the picture because that feels to me just like a colossal exhausting waste of energy. Whereas a radical kind of inclusive self acceptance seems to be a way to create a lot more.

But, all joking apart, there are more serious objections. The sociology of knowledge is not only self-destructive, not only a rather gratifying object of socio-analysis, it also shows an astounding failure to understand precisely its main subject, the social aspects of knowledge, or rather, of scientific method. It looks upon science or knowledge as a process in the mind or ‘consciousness’ of the individual scientist, or perhaps as the product of such a process. If considered in this way, what we call scientific objectivity must indeed become completely ununderstandable, or even impossible; and not only in the social or political sciences, where class interests and similar hidden motives may play a part, but just as much in the natural sciences. Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring. If scientific objectivity were founded, as the sociologistic theory of knowledge naïvely assumes, upon the individual scientist’s impartiality or objectivity, then we should have to say good-bye to it. Indeed, we must be in a way more radically sceptical than the sociology of knowledge; for there is no doubt that we are all suffering under our own system of prejudices (or ‘total ideologies’, if this term is preferred); that we all take many things as self-evident, that we accept them uncritically and even with the naïve and cocksure belief that criticism is quite unnecessary; and scientists are no exception to this rule, even though they may have superficially purged themselves from some of their prejudices in their particular field. But they have not purged themselves by socio-analysis or any similar method; they have not attempted to climb to a higher plane from which they can understand, socio-analyse, and expurgate their ideological follies. For by making their minds more ‘objective’ they could not possibly attain to what we call ‘scientific objectivity’. No, what we usually mean by this term rests on different grounds8. It is a matter of scientific method. And, ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the intersubjectivity of scientific method. But this social aspect of science is almost entirely neglected by those who call themselves sociologists of knowledge.

And the goal is big: radical self-acceptance for women everywhere, political change so total it shakes the ground, justice and joy for those who have been used and tossed aside. And the goal is small: utter and unbridled selfhood.

Like a boundless sea, we have the capacity to embrace the waves of life as they move through us. Even when the sea is stirred up by the winds of self-doubt, we can find our way home.

Radical self-acceptance enables us to sit at the feet of our life to be taught. Being taught transforms our fears and struggles into a kind of compost from which we may grow a more joyful life. And, along the way, we become a little more free of self-imposed obstacles and become a little more our Self. And, we are glad.

I’ve often been told you have to play the game to get what you want, give a little of yourself up to get the results you desire. But what if that’s all bullshit? What if every time I put a strip of false lashes on and cross my legs on a talk-show stage, I am not getting any closer to creating the change I want to see in the world? What if every pair of Spanx, every morning-TV-ready joke, every Instagram shout-out to the person who made my dress only carries me farther away from my goal? And the goal is big: radical self-acceptance for women everywhere, political change so total it shakes the ground, justice and joy for those who have been used and tossed aside. And the goal is small: utter and unbridled selfhood.

D. H. Lawrence wrote: “Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

Take Responsibility for Your Negative Thoughts Many times when we are plagued with negative thoughts, it can be tempting to blame other people for the unpleasant situation which we may be facing. We might adopt a victim mentality or point a finger at other people as we try to avoid being accountable for the situation. This, however, is not a very effective way of dealing with uncomfortable or negative thoughts. While it might provide us with some temporary relief, it prevents us from considering the actual problem, thereby hindering us from finding long-lasting solutions. It is important to remember that even though you are not in control of everything that happens in your life, ultimately you are responsible for the choices you make and the outcomes which emerge as a result of those decisions. You should, therefore, learn to hold yourself accountable for any negative thoughts you may be experiencing. Take the initiative to seek out permanent solutions for them so that they do not interfere with your internal state of wellbeing.

Try to gain a different perspective of your negative thinking by looking at it from a new point of view. Use your anxiety and frustration as forces for good by channeling them towards creation. Painting, writing and composing music can act as outlets for your negative thoughts. Take frequent walks in serene environments to relax your mind whenever you feel bombarded by too much negative thinking. Recognize, focus on and be grateful for all the good things you have going for you in your life, no matter how insignificant they may seem. Spend some time in your favorite outdoor and indoor locations where you feel comfortable and relaxed. This can help calm your mind whenever you spiral into negative thinking and overthinking. Exercise in order to give your body an outlet for anxiety and stress. This will relax your body and mind when you feel assailed by negative thoughts. This can be as simple as jogging for a few minutes, climbing some stairs or performing some stretching exercises. Practice deep breathing exercises to release tension in your body and mind whenever you feel overwhelmed by negative thoughts. This helps you to attain some clarity of mind.

To resist being the TBG, start by forgiving yourself for the times you behaved in a way that betrayed your true identity.

It was not until I was in my thirties that it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting myself. Perhaps the victory that lay at the end of the long road of self-denial and repression was not a reward that I actually wanted. Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself into a new me didn’t exist. Perhaps I was going to spend my entire life fighting my own existence and then just . . . die.

We must be clear that people's bodies are not the cause of our social maladies. [...] Our disconnection, trauma, lack of resources, lack of compassion, fear, greed, and ego are the sources of our contributions to human suffering not our bodies. We can accept humans and their bodies without understanding "why" they love, think, move, or look the way they do. Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

This book is offered to you in the hope that it will validate your deepest desires and dreams for your life while challenging you to accept the responsibility of bringing them into being.

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.

In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes: In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone. Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.

She taught me the four key skills in DBT. First is mindfulness. It’s the ability to radically accept things as they are and be present in the moment. The second is distress tolerance, which is the ability to tolerate negative emotions instead of trying to escape from them. The third is emotional regulation, which teaches you the ability to manage and change intense and problematic emotions. The fourth is interpersonal effectiveness, which teaches you to communicate with others in a way that is assertive, maintains self-respect, and strengthens relationships.

What I needed was radical self-acceptance; to meet myself exactly where I was, not where I thought I had to be. Otherwise I'd likely be in transit forever, waiting for the moment when I finally arrived at the belief that I was worthy of being loved.

Radical acceptance also means not overlooking another important truth - the endless creativity and possibility that exist in living. By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life would unfold, we open ourselves to hope, so that we can move forward with vitality and will. “Radical Acceptance, Ch 2 Awakening form the Trance: The Path of Radical Acceptance”.

We embark on one self-improvement project after another. We strive to meet the media standards for the perfect body and looks by coloring out the gray, lifting our face, being on a perpetual diet. We push ourselves to get a better position at work. We exercise, take enriching courses of study, meditate, make lists, volunteer, take workshops. Certainly any of these activities can be undertaken in a wholesome way, but so often they are driven by anxious undercurrents of “not good enough.” Rather than relaxing and enjoying who we are and what we’re doing, we are comparing ourselves with an ideal and trying to make up for the difference.

I wanted to know what it would be like if all boundaries dissolved and I just let life live through me. As I relaxed open, my heart and mind filled with tenderness toward everything that felt so painful in me and seemed so wrong. I realized that any argument I had with life—from a slight self-criticism to the utter anguish of shame—separated me from the love and awareness that are my true home.

When we say, “I accept myself as I am,” we are not accepting a story about a good or bad self. Rather, we are accepting the immediate mental and sensory experiences we interpret as self. We are seeing the familiar wants and fears, the judging and planning thoughts as a part of the flow of life. Accepting them in this way actually enables us to recognize that experience is impersonal and frees us from the trap of identifying ourselves as a deficient and limited self. I

After a lifetime of contorting myself to fit into boxes never meant for the likes of me—it’s true. I got tired of feeling ashamed all the time. It is wildly subversive to say that I no longer feel ashamed—not in body, soul, beliefs, or movement through the world, not for who, what, or how I am. I do not hold an apology for the ways, hows, and whos of my work, my desire, and my love. There is an ownership of power in this simple fact that refuses to fit into words. But if you see me, you’ll know it. Sovereignty. That’s what I call it. Somehow, through all the twists and turns and fuckery of this life, I became a woman who is sovereign unto herself. Does this mean I’ve beaten all my demons and that I don’t give a fuck, and that everything is peachy keen all the time? Oh, hell no. Not even close. I am a woman who will forever be grappling with herself—pushing and growing and expanding and contracting, learning and unlearning, and tripping over the same lessons 50 times or more on the way to integration. It gets messy in this brain, heart, and body of mine. That’s just how I’m made. But the fact remains that no person, relationship, religion, belief system, or organization holds me to any agreement that negates my contract with myself. Fact: Your shame serves nobody. In fact, where there is shame, there is no pleasure. It is your pleasure that the universe spirals eternally toward. There comes a time in human evolution when a woman gets tired of asking permission to live, breathe, be, and love in the most honest and true way. When she stops looking outside of herself, she writes her own permission slip and doesn’t look back. A time when she is ready to own her story. Remove the masks. Shed the shame. Speak and write and live as a human sovereign unto herself. Are you ready to be subversive? How about revolutionary? Is this finally your time?

Do We Need a Eulogy or a Birth Announcement? Like most African-Americans my age and older, I have been touched by the virtue and disturbed by the failures of the African-American church. I have had some of the richest times of celebration and praise in local black churches. And I’ve also experienced some of the most perplexing and discouraging situations in this same institution. It was an African-American preacher who vouched for me when I was facing criminal charges as a rising junior in high school, making all the difference in my future. And it was the membership of a black Baptist congregation that nearly poisoned my love for the church when, as a new Christian, I witnessed the “brawl” of my first church business meeting. The preaching of the church gave me biblical tropes and themes for building a sense of self in the world. But a low level of spiritual living among many African-American Christians tempted me to believe that everything in the Black Church was show-and-tell, a tragic comedy of self-delusion and religious hypocrisy. I left the Black Church of my youth and converted to Islam during college. I became zealous for Islam and a staunch critic of the Black Church. I welcomed much of the criticisms of radicals, Afrocentrists, and groups like the Nation of Islam. I cut my teeth on the writing and speaking of men like Molefi Kete Asante, Na’im Akbar, Wade Noble, and Louis Farrakhan. The institution that helped nurture me I now deem a real enemy to the progress of African-Americans, an opiate and a tool of white supremacy. I had experienced enough of the church’s weakness to reject her altogether. The immature and undiscerning rarely know how to handle the failures of its heroes, to evaluate with nuance and critical appreciation. That was true of me before the Lord saved me. In July 1995, sitting in an African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church in the Washington, DC, area, a short, square, balding African-American preacher expounded the text of Exodus 32. With passion and insight, he detailed the idolatry of Israel and exposed the idolatry of my heart. As he pressed on, more and more I felt guilty for my sin, estranged from God, and deserving of God’s holy judgment. Then, from the text of Exodus 32, he preached Jesus Christ, the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world and reconciles sinners to God. He proclaimed the cross of Jesus Christ, where my sins had been nailed and the Son of God punished in my place. The preacher announced the resurrection of Christ, proving the Father accepted the Son’s sacrifice. Then the pastor called every sinner to repent and put their trust—not in themselves—but in Jesus Christ alone for righteousness, forgiveness, and eternal life. It was as if he addressed me alone though I sat in a congregation of eight thousand. That morning, under the preaching of the gospel from God’s Word, the Spirit gave me and my wife repentance and faith leading to eternal life. I was a dead man when I walked into that building. But I left a living man, revived by God’s Word and Spirit.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

Recovery is a resumption of the work that was not completed when the woman was a girl. It is a coming into her own. It is an opportunity to resume the normal process of development that was sidetracked, perhaps first by constrained roles, perhaps by trauma, and then multiplied many times by hiding in the addiction. Her development was sidetracked by not accepting her needs as legitimate and not finding healthy ways to meet them, by not even knowing her needs. And so this is what recovery is: a developmental process of finding and building a new self. Recovery is a process of radical growth and change. When you are in recovery, you give birth to a new self. [...] Many women initially think that recovery means a move from bad to good. They think that being addicted is evidence of shameful neediness, of deep and lasting failures. Recovery is not a move from bad to good, but from false to real. [...] It is reality, being real, that now guides her rather than her efforts to be good or bad.

What I'm fetishizing is not poverty (contrary to some people's beliefs, I am smarter than that) or even utter freedom––a life without obligations seems lonely and borderline worthless––but rather the obliteration of any sense of expectation: the expectation that my femininity, my body or my work should conform to any set of rules, any aesthetic other than my own. I've often been told you have to play the game to get what you want, give a little of yourself up to get the results you desire. But what if that's all bullshit? What is every time I put a strip of false lashes on and cross my legs on a talk show stage, I am not getting any closer to creating the change I want to see in the world? What is every pair of Spanx, every morning-TV-ready joke, every Instagram shout-out to the person who made my dress only carries me farther away from my goal? And the goal is big: radical self-acceptance for women everywhere, political change so total it shakes the ground, justice and joy for those who have been used and tossed aside. And the goal is small: utter and unbridled selfhood.

foundational attitude for which we pray is that we might desire what gives God glory more deeply than we desire any other created reality. This spiritual freedom is so radical and so beyond our power to create in ourselves that it brings us face to face with our own poverty and our need for continual prayer. Sometimes all we can muster is the desire to desire what God desires! But any degree of hunger, any desire for God, any seeking of God’s call already happens through God’s Spirit, and God accepts it as enough. Over time, through repeated discernments and through daily living of one’s Christian life, this desire can become an increasingly natural and habitual orientation. As that transformation occurs, we experience deeper and deeper spiritual freedom. 2. Discover and name the issue or choice you face. What is really at stake is not always self-evident. An ambiguous or sprawling issue can obscure or even prevent subsequent discernment. Carefully framing the issue not only helps to clarify the matter for discernment, but it also actually begins the process of sifting and discriminating that is at the heart of discernment. 3. Gather and evaluate appropriate data about the issue. Discernment is not magic. We have to do our homework. The efficacy of the subsequent decision can rise or fall on obtaining accurate and relevant information about various options and their implications. However, since decision making is not identical to discernment, it is possible to botch a decision while still advancing in discernment. Fortunately, through grace, it is quite possible to grow in discipleship, manifest greater spiritual freedom, and hunger more strongly for what God desires in the midst of a failed decision. But prudence demands that we do the homework necessary. 4. Reflect and pray. Actually we have been praying from the outset. We pray for spiritual freedom. We select and frame the issue for discernment in prayer. We prayerfully select and consider the relevant data. But as we begin the process of discrimination in a more focused way, it is important to renew our attention to prayer. 5. Formulate a tentative decision. Many different methods can help us come to a decision, and therefore aid our discernment. We will explore seven methods in the entry points in this book, but many options exist in the tradition. Discerned decision making can employ any decision-making process, whether traditional or newly created, that fits the material being

All of this means that the call to contentment is a summons to realize and accept our place in Christ and his body — and, more broadly, our place in the gift exchange in society through common grace. This cuts off at the root the discontentment — ambition — to change our station in life not only in the direction of prosperity, but also in a self-imposed poverty. “I know how to be brought low,” Paul says, “and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:12 – 13). Restless

As is well-known among those who still remember Marxism, the ambiguous central point of its theoretical edifice concerns its premise that capitalism itself creates the conditions for its self-overcoming through proletarian revolution - how are we to read this? Is it to be read in a linear evolutionary way: revolution should take place when capitalism fully develops all its potentials and exhausts all its possibilities, the mythic point at which it confronts its central antagonism ("contradiction") at its purest, in its naked form? And is it enough to add the "subjective" aspect and to emphasize that the working class should not just sit and wait for the "ripe moment," but to "educate" itself through long struggle? As is also well-known, Lenin's theory of the "weakest link of the chain" is a kind of compromise-solution: although it accepts that the first revolution can take place not in the most developed country, but in a country in which antagonisms of the capitalist development are most aggravated, even if it is less developed (Russia, which combined concentrated modern capitalist-industrial islands with agrarian backwardness and pre-democratic authoritarian government), it still perceived October Revolution as a risky break-through which can only succeed if it will be soon accompanied by a large-scale Western European revolution (all eyes were focused on Germany in this respect). The radical abandonment of this model occurred only with Mao, for whom the proletarian revolution should take place in the less developed part of the world, among the large crowds of the Third World impoverished peasants, workers and even "patriotic bourgeoisie," who are exposed to the aftershocks of the capitalist globalization, organizing their rage and despair. In a total reversal (perversion even) of the Marx's model, the class struggle is thus reformulated as the struggle between the First World "bourgeois nations" and the Third World "proletarian nations.

Here is why the wellbeing economy comes at the right time. At the international level there have been some openings, which can be exploited to turn the wellbeing economy into a political roadmap. The first was the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The SDGs are a loose list of 17 goals, ranging from good health and personal wellbeing to sustainable cities and communities as well as responsible production and consumption. They are a bit scattered and inconsistent, like most outcomes of international negotiations, but they at least open up space for policy reforms. For the first time in more than a century, the international community has accepted that the simple pursuit of growth presents serious problems. Even when it comes at high speed, its quality is often debatable, producing social inequalities, lack of decent work, environmental destruction, climate change and conflict. Through the SDGs, the UN is calling for a different approach to progress and prosperity. This was made clear in a 2012 speech by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who explicitly connected the three pillars of sustainable development: ‘Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible.’82 Unlike in the previous century, we now have a host of instruments and indicators that can help politicians devise different policies and monitor results and impacts throughout society. Even in South Africa, a country still plagued by centuries of oppression, colonialism, extractive economic systems and rampant inequality, the debate is shifting. The country’s new National Development Plan has been widely criticised because of the neoliberal character of the main chapters on economic development. Like the SDGs, it was the outcome of negotiations and bargaining, which resulted in inconsistencies and vagueness. Yet, its opening ‘vision statement’ is inspired by a radical approach to transformation. What should South Africa look like in 2030? The language is uplifting: We feel loved, respected and cared for at home, in community and the public institutions we have created. We feel understood. We feel needed. We feel trustful … We learn together. We talk to each other. We share our work … I have a space that I can call my own. This space I share. This space I cherish with others. I maintain it with others. I am not self-sufficient alone. We are self-sufficient in community … We are studious. We are gardeners. We feel a call to serve. We make things. Out of our homes we create objects of value … We are connected by the sounds we hear, the sights we see, the scents we smell, the objects we touch, the food we eat, the liquids we drink, the thoughts we think, the emotions we feel, the dreams we imagine. We are a web of relationships, fashioned in a web of histories, the stories of our lives inescapably shaped by stories of others … The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all … Our land is our home. We sweep and keep clean our yard. We travel through it. We enjoy its varied climate, landscape, and vegetation … We live and work in it, on it with care, preserving it for future generations. We discover it all the time. As it gives life to us, we honour the life in it.83 I could have not found better words to describe the wellbeing economy: caring, sharing, compassion, love for place, human relationships and a profound appreciation of what nature does for us every day. This statement gives us an idea of sufficiency that is not about individualism, but integration; an approach to prosperity that is founded on collaboration rather than competition. Nowhere does the text mention growth. There’s no reference to scale; no pompous images of imposing infrastructure, bridges, stadiums, skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. We make the things we need. We, as people, become producers of our own destiny. The future is not about wealth accumulation, massive

Every time we hide a defeat, we reinforce the fear that we are insufficient. When we strive to impress or outdo others, we strengthen the underlying belief that we are not good enough as what we are. When our efforts are driven by the fear that we are flawed, we deepen the trance of unworthiness. “Radical Acceptance, Ch 1 On the Trance of Unworthiness”.

In pursuit of making a situation seemingly more equitable, do you often lose?

all suffering or dissatisfaction arises from a mistaken understanding that we are a separate and distinct self.

As Tara Brach (author of Radical Acceptance) writes: “Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It seems like a vicious cycle: the more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel.

Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity; Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth; Theory rejects these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality—unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods it calls “critical.” This is no surprise since critical methods have always been explicitly and by design critical of liberalism as a means of social, political, and economic organization.

Rosie Molinary, in her book Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance. “You are here on purpose. You have a unique gift to give this world—one that it desperately needs for its own healing—and it has nothing to do with how your body looks.

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.

We are conditioned to be superconscious of how we speak. With hypervisibility as a Black woman comes hyperawareness. Of how you sound, how you look, how you eat, how you walk, how you breathe. It’s exhausting.

We adjust our tone so we don’t offend others by possibly coming off as aggressive. We withhold words because we fear that if we say something, we will be vilified. We hold the weight of speaking for all Black women with our voices, when we just want to speak for ourselves. Whew. Girl.