What's Acceptance Got To Do With It?
When you face stress and difficult situations in your day-to-day life, how do you respond? Maybe you work longer hours, scroll through social media, have a few cocktails, binge watch Netflix, eat a pint of ice cream, ruminate about your frustration, drink more coffee…the list could go on and on. Thus, our stress persists. Most of us do not turn towards our stress; instead, we resist. And what we resist, persists.
We all have experienced resistance. Resistance shows up in many forms—procrastination, anger, humor, disassociation, worry, anxiety, avoidance, overwhelm—and tends to manifest as part of our stress reactivity patterns. Maybe you’re familiar with flight, fight, freeze or fawn?
Resistance, in fact, may start out as exactly what is needed to protect us in a given moment. But it can also turn into a stumbling block that keeps us stuck in old habits and spin cycles of thoughts and emotions. Simply put, resistance is wanting things to be different than they are. And remember, what we resist, persists.
Can you relate to this? I know I can! In fact, there was resistance coming up for me as I wrote this blog. My resistance showed up as being too busy to finish; and underneath that was the fear of not being “good enough” and my desire to be perfect.
Our brains are hardwired to protect us when we feel threatened—to resist, to move into fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode. And when things don’t go as expected or we are faced with challenging circumstances, we experience pain. Pain can then lead to suffering, and suffering is exponentially increased when we resist it.
Kristin Neff, PhD, is the co-founder of the Center of Mindful Self Compassion and one of the world’s leading experts on self-compassion. I took my first Mindful Self-Compassion class in 2020 and it was transformative. As an overachieving career woman, wife, and mother of two, who did not feel like she was enough, this class provided me with tools to tame my inner critic, offer myself kindness, and be more resilient when faced with life’s challenges. I am now certified to teach Dr. Neff’s Mindful Self-Compassion class and was inspired to write this blog based on a simple equation she came up with to describe how resistance increases our suffering:
Suffering = Pain * Resistance
The amount we suffer in life is the product of the pain itself, multiplied by how much we resist it. Which leads us to this paradox: a small pain can cause massive suffering, or we can feel a lot of pain without much suffering. It all depends on how much we resist.
Here’s an example: you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way to work (pain). In scenario 1, you get angry and blame the other drivers, ruminating on how late you are going to be for your meetings and the cascading impact this will have on your day (lots of resistance). Or in scenario 2, you realize that sitting in your car is reasonably comfortable and you enjoy the extra time you have to listen to your new audio book (no resistance).
The antidote to resistance is acceptance.
Here is a practice that can help you move from resistance to acceptance, by using the three A’s:
Awareness—Take a breath, scanning the body and noticing any resistance.
Allowing—Turn towards the pain, getting curious about what’s happening.
Acceptance—Let go of expectations and the desire for things to be different than they are.
Remember that resistance I mentioned earlier? I used the antidote of acceptance to bring awareness to my resistance and allow it to be, which in turn allowed me to finish writing this blog.
We all face unexpected pains in our life. But what dictates our experience or amount of suffering is how we manage our response—choosing either acceptance or resistance. And I invite you to choose acceptance.
Mindfully yours,
Stefanie
For more on acceptance, check out this great short video by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction:
“Acceptance is a very active process, there is nothing passive about it; it is not passive resignation but rather an act of recognition that things are the way they are.” —Jon Kabat-Zinn