Self Esteem
Awakening to the Source of Longing: Radical Acceptance Chapter Six
July 31, 2026
— CHRISTINE SPARACINO
This week we read Chapter 6: Radical Acceptance of Desire: Awakening to the source of longing. In case you missed it, I'm hosting a slow read of Tara Brach's book, Radical Acceptance. Last week we recapped Chapter Five, and there’s still time to catch up.
This week Tara Brach speaks to us about desire, from sexual desire, cravings and addiction, to unmet emotional needs. She shares her own experience when she was first learning about Buddhism and how she misunderstood the Buddha’s teachings.
She clarifies for us, the reader, that desire is not a problem in itself. Instead, it is the way we cling to desire and our experiences that causes our suffering.
When we bring mindfulness to our experiences, we have the perspective that what we are feeling is temporary, that it will pass, and that every impulse does not need action or fixing on our part. Brach states, “It doesn’t matter what is happening. What matters is how we are relating to our experience.” The type of perspective asks us how to relate to our desire without being possessed by it or ignoring it.
Brach explains that desire is not an enemy but an essential part of being human. When we are hungry, we desire food; when we are thirsty, we desire something to drink. When Abraham Maslow created his hierarchy of needs, he reminded us we have a variety of needs, and our most basic needs must be met in order for us to move to higher-ordered needs and their fulfillment.
“Our desire for happiness is, most fundamentally, the desire to exist.” ~ Tara Brach
We struggle with desire and pleasure because we to cling to it, not wanting it to change or end. When we are happy, we naturally wish to always feel that way. This leads to a resistance to other experiences and emotions. We don’t like change; how we feel different on different days, how some days we feel good and other days not as much. We even want our energy to remain constant.
Because we don’t like the inherent changing nature of our experiences, sensations, and feelings, we cling to pleasurable moments and deny unpleasant ones. This can lead us to seeking more pleasure. And when our seeking of pleasure leaves us unfulfilled, we naturally feel frustrated.
Brach gives us two case examples - Chris and Sarah. The story of Chris speaks to the emotional neglect he experienced as a child, not receiving love and affection from his parents. This created a sense of worthlessness deep inside his psyche, and he spent much of his energy trying to feel good enough, significant, and successful.
Unmet needs from childhood are distressing, and humans naturally engage in compensatory strategies to avoid feeling the emotional pain. These strategies might look like:
These strategies keep us from feeling emotional pain and provide a way to distract, numb, or avoid.
“I can resist anything but temptation.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The case of Sarah speaks about compulsive eating, and the self-punishment she engaged in to cure the addiction. She was obsessed with food, thinking about it frequently and feeling uncontrolled when she was around it. Feeling guilty about her loss of control and her emotional needs, she punished herself with negative self-talk and statements, to stop her over-eating behavior.
This type of approach, while reinforced in diet culture, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each time the person missteps and engages in the behavior they are trying to avoid, they feel shame and use negative self-statements to “correct” their behavior and set themselves straight. However, shame rarely changes our behavior for the better. Instead, we become more entrenched in self-hatred.
Brach is clear: people experiencing addiction need self-compassion and understanding, not self-flagellation. We need to extend forgiveness to ourselves when we make missteps.
Religious traditions tend to equate desire with sin, and these beliefs extend to culture at large. We believe that desire makes us greedy or narcissistic, and that we should mistrust our longings. Unfortunately, this mistrust of ourselves becomes widespread.
“We have been raised to fear…our deepest cravings.” ~ Audre Lorde
Brach gives us a solution: to meet our desire with Radical Acceptance, to notice our sensations and emotions, to let ourselves feel them, and to not get attached to fulfilling or ridding ourselves of them. When we inhabit our longing and get in touch with our wants, the impulses can move freely through us, and we find we don’t have to act on each one. We can choose how to respond, rather than being reactive. We also heal the shame that surrounds our desires, and we stop fearing that they make us “bad” or deficient.
“Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.” ~ Tara Brach
The story of Chris reminded me of something I wrote a year ago: how we work ourselves to retirement, focusing on achievements and success, only to find ourselves in the next stage of life and lost about who we are and what to do. American culture encourages us to “work hard” until we get to retirement, but how to live while we work is ignored.
This is often the experience of hard-working, high-performing individuals. Their identity is wrapped up in their work and career identity, leaving them disconnected from themselves. When they retire and don’t have the structure of work in their days, they suddenly realize they don’t know how to live or who they are. They were so focused on achieving that they lost themselves in the process.
Perhaps, we need to look deeper than the appearance and ask, “What feelings and experiences am I trying to avoid with my productivity and hard work?”
In my own life, I was driven to succeed and achieve. My driven nature led me to pursuing a doctoral degree, a level of education that I figured would set me apart. In my mind, it seemed that once I graduated, I would feel fulfilled by the accomplishment, as if I had “finally arrived.”
The reality of my experience could not have been any different. Instead, once I graduated and entered my career field, the bar kept moving. I didn’t feel accomplished or successful; instead I felt inferior because I wasn’t speaking at conferences or conducting research or publishing books. There was always some next level out of reach that led me to feel insignificant with what I had already achieved.
Both Chris and Sarah’s stories remind me of scarcity mentality and what happens when our needs are not met, whether they are emotional, material, psychological. This type of thinking convinces us that there is not enough good to go around.
As a result, we fear (mostly unconscious) that our needs won’t get met and that we will go without. Because this is the perspective we have about life, we make decisions out of our scarcity.
Living with unmet needs and feeling the emotion of that often translates into feeling bad that we have needs to begin with. Feeling our needs transmutes into feeling “needy,” a shameful adjective that we will do anything to avoid.
Can we acknowledge our needs, choose how to get our needs met, in a way that honors our humanity? And in a way that redefines what it means to have needs?
This week there are two guided meditations. Both are short, about two-three minutes each.
I am attaching them for you to listen: Not Doing When We Feel Driven by Wanting (1) and Discovering Your Deepest Longing (2).
You may prefer to record your own meditations using the scripts provided in the book. Whichever meditations you choose to use, try listening a couple times this week.
It can be helpful to journal about your experience with meditation. You can make note of what you noticed before the meditation (how you felt in your body, what you noticed feeling), how the meditation felt while you were listening (sensations in your body and emotions), and how you felt afterward.
Reflecting on the experience with expressive writing and journaling can help you notice your experience in a new way.
We move on to Chapter Seven. Happy reading!
If you missed Chapter Five, you can read the recap.
