

Session 6
Acceptance: allowing what is there

Acceptence:
Acceptance
Have the courage to change what you can change. Have the composure to accept what cannot be changed. Have the wisdom to see the difference between the two.
Acceptance is a difficult concept for many people. Is acceptance the same as resignation? In mindfulness, however, we see acceptance as the opposite of resignation. In mindfulness training, acceptance means that you try to admit what is there. Don’t immediately focus on solving something or changing something. With mindfulness you try to take a friendly attitude towards what you experience. Don’t reject your thoughts, but accept that they are there. Often people tend to want to get rid of gloomy thoughts or bad emotions. This gives, as it were, a struggle with these thoughts and emotions. Trying to get rid of them will get you into your active do mode. This takes a lot of energy and often it is not possible to get rid of the thoughts and feelings.
If you can accept that such thoughts and emotions are there, without going into them, you will lose less energy. Being kind to all experiences helps to accept them. People tend to give a judgment with every thought or feeling: ‘this is a bad thought’, or: ‘this is a bad feeling’. This is often followed by an action: ‘I don’t want this thought or feeling, it has to go’. Accepting what is there means you don’t have to judge it. Every thought, every feeling is allowed to be there as it is.
The following poem illustrates the process of acceptance:

The Inn
Being human is an inn
New guests come every day
Cheerfulness, gloom, lowness, Just a bright moment as an unexpected visitor
Welcome them and offer them all a hospitable welcome!
Even though it’s a lot of worries that turn your house upside down
Still, treat every guest with respect
Maybe he’ll clean up with you and makes way for something else, something nice.
The gloomy thought, the shame, the malice, Meet them at the door smiling and invite them in
Be grateful for whoever comes, for each of them has been sent like a guide from the unknown
Uit: Barks en Moyne: The essential Rumi. San Francisco: Harper, 1997.
Why is acceptance so important?
Accepting your feelings and your thoughts is so important because the alternative is often very taxing. When you don’t accept your feelings and your thoughts and start “fighting” them, it can lead to the return of old, automatic patterns. It can set in motion a negative circle in which negative thoughts lead to unpleasant feelings and physical complaints. These in turn ensure that the negative thoughts are reinforced. For example, it can happen that a negative downward spiral occurs. Such a spiral can cause people to develop more and more gloom or anxiety complaints. By accepting such a thought or feeling (for example, the thought: ‘sorry that the food failed’) and not fighting against it, the chain of thoughts and feelings that make each other more and more extreme is broken.
You then see the thought as ‘a thought’, which passes again. By not taking the content of the thought seriously and by not continuing with it, you will not get into the negative spiral that goes down. You learn to ‘relate differently’ to your thoughts and feelings, as it were.
You perceive them, but keep your distance and therefore does not go along with the content.



The basic guideline when practicing awareness is to become aware of what most dominates in your experience from moment to moment.
If your attention is always drawn to a certain place, thought, feeling or certain physical sensation, pay attention to it in a friendly way, that is the first step. The second step is to notice as well as possible how you deal with what is happening in that place. If we don’t want it, because it’s too painful, unpleasant, or uncomfortable in some way, we tend to fend it off out of fear, irritation, or annoyance and push it away. All of these reactions are the opposite of acceptance.
The easiest way to deal with this in a relaxed way is first of all to stop trying to want things differently than they are.
Accepting an experience simply means making room for what’s going on instead of trying to make it something else. By accepting it, we bring ourselves back to what is. We look at things as they are, we simply notice them and perceive what is there. This is the way to deal with experiences that strongly attract our attention.
For example, if you notice that your attention to breathing is constantly distracted by certain sensations in the body that have to do with physical discomfort, emotions or feelings, then the first thing you should do is become aware of that physical sensation, thought or feeling by deliberately focusing your attention on what is most present. Breathing can be helpful.
In the same way as with the body scan, you can kindly focus your attention on that part of your body, that thought or feeling, by breathing and breathing out of it with each inhalation.
Once you are aware of that, you say to yourself; It’s okay, whatever it is, it’s allowed to be there. Just let me feel it. Use each exhalation to open up to the sensation you are becoming aware of.
Acceptance is not resignation but a necessary first step to becoming fully aware of your difficulties. After that, you can react to it in a sensible way instead of reflexively throwing one old strategy after another (often fruitlessly) into the fray.
“If we remain fixated on the difference between how we would like to be and how we see ourselves now, then we can become suffocated in old patterns of self-criticism, worrying and avoidance.”

Exercises for next week at session 6

1. Practice the (long) sitting meditation for 5 days. You can do this with the mp3, but you can also choose to do the meditation in silence.
2. Practice the five-minute exercise twice daily, either as standard or as coping. You can make your own choice.
3. Try to make time regularly to do a movement exercise (yoga or walking meditation).
4. Optional: possibly alternate with the sitting meditation physical sensations or sitting with attention

We have now reached the end of week 6. You have read the texts, done the assignments, listened to the audio files daily and thought about yourself in this way. Now briefly summarize what you have learned from this session.
1. What do you take away from this session
2. what are you going to do next week
3. What will this bring you?
