Self Esteem
Coming Home to Your Body: Radical Acceptance Chapter 5
July 24, 2026
— CHRISTINE SPARACINO
This week we read Chapter 5 of Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance: Coming Home to Our Body.
As we begin this week, I wanted to offer a trigger warning. One of the examples Brach uses is a story of a woman and her experience of childhood sexual abuse. If this could be upsetting for you, feel free to skip the section “Traumatic Fear: Dissociating From Our Body” (pg 108). You can pick back up on pg. 115 with “Healing Our Wounds: Returning Home to Our Body.”
The theme of this week’s reading is about our relationship with our physical bodies. Tara Brach reminds us that we experience life through our bodies.
She begins the chapter with an example from her own life, sharing the conflict she had with her son about his homework and computer time. As she felt angry with him, she paused and noticed the sensations in her body, feelings of pressure in her chest, and how these physical sensations were the seat of her anger.
“All of our strategies of trying to control life through blaming or withdrawing are aimed at keeping us from the raw experience of just such a moment.”
Through pausing and noticing the experience in her body, she became aware of the fear she felt in her relationship with her son. This is the connection between mind and body - that the physical sensations (tight chest, hunched shoulders, jaw tension) are the messengers of emotions. That we feel our feelings (anger, fear, love, joy) through our physical symptoms and experiences.
Brach explains that Radical Acceptance connects us with the most basic part of being alive: the physical sensations of our bodies.
“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” - Henry David Thoreau
Brach encourages us to connect, through pausing, noticing, and naming, with our physical sensations, and as we do so, the sensations and the feelings change and move through us, rather than becoming stuck or lodged. This practice takes us from reacting to life as a reflex into a mindful way of existing. However, humans aren’t good at this; we tend to live disconnected from our bodies, which Brach calls “living from the neck up.”
“If we are not living with awareness of our body, we are not fully alive.”
Brach explains that the beginning of our feelings are in our physical sensations. This is a debated point - researchers have been trying for decades to understand emotions and how they originate (for more, see Antonio Demasio’s work). Brach makes the argument that we feel the physical sensations first and then the emotions follow based on how the mind interprets the sensation.
In pausing to notice what we feel in our bodies, she reminds us that mindfulness is noting what we experience without trying to change it. This is a great contrast from how our culture treats the human body, most often as an obstacle to overcome. Bringing in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, she reminds us that pain is not the enemy.
“We suffer when we cling to or resist experience, when we want life different than it is.”
The problem is not the pain itself, but the story we tell ourselves when we feel pain. With Brach’s original example of her son, the anger she felt was actually linked to her feelings of inferiority about her parenting. The stories we tell ourselves when we feel difficult emotions and physical sensations are more problematic than the actual experience.
One of my favorite quotes in this chapter is “If you are not here, what are you saving yourself for?” By Hameed Ali.
What impressions do you get from this quote?
Tara Brach brings up Alice Miller in this Chapter. If you’re unfamiliar with her, she wrote a bestseller entitled “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the true self.” I read this book in undergrad, recommended by my therapist. The book opened my eyes to understanding myself as a parentified child and an over-responsible person. She puts words to the emotional neglect that many adults experienced growing up.
I have written a lot about the body as it has been a focus of mine both personally and professionally (you can read more chronic illness and the body, and the mind-body connection in therapy, healing your relationship with your body, and body image and self-acceptance.) Living with chronic illness myself, I have had a complex journey over time with my health and thus my body. Like any journey, there are peak mountain top experiences where the view is grand and you feel enthused and moments in the valley, exhausted and parched.
Through these experiences, I have learned to treat my body with more respect and to honor its state, whether I agree with it or not, whether I want my body to perform better.
Is your body in need of a friend?
There are two meditations this week, meant to connect you more with your body. For the sake of time and due to my insomnia, I didn’t have time to record them. So perhaps you record a voice memo and read the meditation yourself.
As always, write about your experience. You can make bullet points about what you noticed as you paused and checked-in with your body. You can free write, keeping your pen to the page. Instead of paper and pen, you might try speaking into your phone, recording your thoughts of the experience.
We move on to Chapter Six. Happy reading!
