Acceptance Practices

topic

Acceptance practices in mindfulness involve the cultivation of radical acceptance — the complete and full acknowledgment of present experience exactly as it is, without requiring that it be different before emotional peace is possible — through both formal meditation (observing arising and passing of experience without interference) and informal practice (recognizing and releasing the moment-to-moment resistance to 'what is' that produces the suffering of wishing things were different from how they are).

Role

Acceptance practice is the most counterintuitive and most transformative mindfulness component — counterintuitive because acceptance is confused with resignation (accepting that something bad is OK) when it actually means acknowledging reality without adding the suffering of wishing it were otherwise, and transformative because a significant proportion of ordinary daily suffering is not produced by life circumstances but by the resistance to those circumstances that acceptance dissolves. The Buddhist observation that 'pain is inevitable, suffering is optional' reflects the research finding that the same objective life circumstances produce vastly different subjective suffering depending on the degree of acceptance or resistance with which they are met — establishing acceptance cultivation as a direct suffering reduction practice independent of the circumstances it accepts.

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