Mindfulness

Acceptance means, among other things, acknowledging the reality of situations – but it isn’t the end of the story.

Acceptance is creative. It opens the door to possibilities.

Often acceptance tells us what to do next and can even lead us down new and interesting paths.

If you get a health diagnosis you don’t like, a refusal to accept it can leave you stuck and even failing to do what you need to do to recover or to manage the condition in the best way for you.

Acceptance, on the other hand, means you find out what you need to do next in your own best interests.

Different paths

Acceptance can also lead you down paths that are unconnected with what you are accepting. Say you disagree with a career choice your child has made but he or she is going to stick with that choice whatever you think.

Accepting this might lead you to look at something you want to do in your life and to set about doing it. Maybe you want to learn a language or how to surf big waves off the coast – nothing to do with your child’s career but much more interesting than sitting there complaining about the kids.

Acceptance opens doors

I often say acceptance is the other half of mindfulness. And sometimes it’s the better half. So next time you have to accept something, remember acceptance can open doors and see what pathways and possibilities it offers.

Acceptance is a key aspect of mindfulness and my 15-lesson Easy Mindfulness online course can help you to build mindfulness into your life.

Page image is by Joshua Jen on Unsplash

We all have behaviours we want to change – even that we ought to change. Let’s call these ‘unwanted behaviours.’

In setting out to change unwanted behaviours, bear in mind the distinction between a true friend and an abusive critic.

How would an abusive critic address your unwanted behaviours? Probably by telling you that you are useless, a failure, a complete waste of space, perhaps a human being who should never have been born. The critic often seems to be more interested in shaming you than in bringing about a change in your behaviour.

The true friend

How would a true friend address those behaviours? Suppose you are irritated by your child’s need for attention and you deny her your presence most of the time? The true friend might say ‘Look, you are depriving your child of something she actually needs; it hurts her and you will regret it in future if you continue this way.’

But the true friend is talking to you from the basic attitude of friendship and of genuinely wanting what’s right for you and for those you love.

So the healthy and self-compassionate approach is to accept yourself as a true friend would. Then move forward toward making the changes you need to bring about.

Mindfulness helps enormously with all of this. To practise mindfulness you come out of your repetitive thoughts to become aware of whatever is happening in the world outside your head – this could be your breathing, or sounds, for instance – and thereby break the chains of negative, painful thinking that can so easily take over your mind. This makes it much easier to spot that negative thinking and to step back from it.

Psychologist and self-compassion teacher Christopher Germer has pointed out that acceptance, including acceptance of yourself,  comes before change. Carl Rogers and those millions of counsellors who follow Rogers’ ideas, was also deeply convinced that acceptance of the self is the forerunner to those changes that need to happen.

When you know that you have your own friendship no matter what, then you are free to look at yourself honestly. You don’t have to deny the truth.

You don’t have to run away from yourself.

Who is talking?

So when you find yourself judging yourself, I think the first step to take is to ask yourself:

Who is talking? Is it the abusive critic or is it the true friend?

Listen to the true friend.

This article is adapted from a lesson in my online, mindful self-compassion course, True Friend. Pay by donation.  Find out about this 15-lesson course.

More on self-compassion

Image by Ross Findon

‘No regrets’ may be a fine name for a song but it won’t work in real life. To live is to accumulate regrets. What gives regrets their sharp edges is the belief that we could have made things work out differently if we had made different choices and it’s too late now. If I had made this choice I could have spared that person some pain; if I had made another choice I could have brought myself more happiness; if I had thought to say ‘No’ or ‘Yes” back then, everything would have been different and so on and on.

Lessons

It’s useful, indeed necessary, in life to look at the lessons we can learn from our regrets and to take what’s useful from them for our future behaviour. The problem is that having done that we often go on regretting and sometimes that too is inevitable. However, it drags us down without achieving anything useful for ourselves or others. It’s these kinds of regrets, the ones we can do nothing about, which we cannot go back and fix (sometimes we’re lucky and we can, but not always) and from which we’ve already taken any useful lesson they can teach us, that the rest of this article is concerned with.

Three steps

So, since regrets are inevitable, how can mindfulness help us to deal with them in our lives, after we have learned what we can from them? The philosophy behind mindfulness suggests three steps: first, we accept the pain we have to accept; second we drop the tendency to re-live the pain; third, we accept that regret is a fact of everybody’s life.

Regret is made up of physical sensations, memories, recurring thoughts (“how could I have been so foolish, blind etc.”) and fantasies (what might have been). When I take a mindful approach I am willing to experience the physical sensations (for instance a tightening of the stomach, a shortening of the breath) but I allow the memories recurring thoughts and fantasies to pass by. They may arise but I don’t follow them, I return to that physical sensation and allow them to pass. In other words, I let them be.

Two arrows

Think of the old Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows. If you were struck by an arrow you would be in pain, no doubt about it. But if you dwell on that experience by going over and over it in your memory or by entertaining revenge fantasies for years afterwards, then you are shooting a second arrow into yourself.

That sudden awareness of regret, that comes now and then – maybe very often – is the first arrow. Wallowing in memories, fantasies and recurring thoughts about the regret is the suffering we add on. To let the thoughts pass, to let them be, is a skill worth learning and you learn it through practice in the moment: the regret arises, you allow yourself to experience the physical sensation that accompanies it and you return to awareness of your breath or of whatever you are doing right now in the moment.

As I said at the start, to live is to accumulate regrets, so you need to handle it in a way that respects what happened but allows you to avoid wallowing in it, so speak, again and again.

Finally, from the Daily Bell:

‘The best among us think, at such a time, of good intentions half-performed and duties left undone,’ says a character in Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. When brooding on such thoughts remember they apply even to ‘the best among us, and be compassionate towards yourself especially if you can no longer do anything to put things right.

Try: When regrets come to you today, remind yourself that regrets are a normal part of the human experience, not in order to dismiss them, but to be a little kinder to yourself.

My Easy Mindfulness 15-lesson online course can help you to move easily from thoughts of the past into the present moment.