What It Means To Accept & How To Do It W/ACT Expert Dr. Hill

If there’s one skill we all need to be practicing right now, it is acceptance. Acceptance is central to maintaining healthy relationships, making a behavior change, pursuing meaningful goals and being at peace with yourself. But how do you do it? What does it look like? In this solo episode, Diana sits down with you to explore what acceptance means and what gets in the way of accepting.

Transcript

I believe that if there's one skill in life that will offer you the most freedom,

It is acceptance.

Acceptance is central to maintaining healthy relationships,

To making a behavior change,

Pursuing meaningful goals,

And being at peace with yourself.

But how do you do it?

What does it look like and feel like to radically accept?

That's what we're going to explore in this episode of Your Life in Process.

I want to remind you that if you are interested in acceptance and commitment therapy,

You can take a self-paced course with me called Foundations of ACT,

And you can find that course on my website,

Drdianahill.

Com.

As a therapist,

Sometimes I need to refer clients to a higher level of care.

And until now,

It's been difficult to find programs that are evidence-based and holistic in their approach.

And that's why I'm so excited to be sponsored by Lightfully Behavioral Health.

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One of the reasons why I wanted to start this podcast,

Your Life in Process,

Is that I wanted to be able to talk directly to you.

I wanted to share with you ideas from psychology and contemplative practice that I use in my life,

But also with the clients and the organizations that I serve.

And probably one of the most important practices that we can do on a daily basis is acceptance.

If you haven't gotten a crash course in acceptance yet in your life,

I'm sure the pandemic has given you one.

It's given all of us one.

And in a lot of ways,

This virus is a messenger for us to wake up to the impermanence of things so that we can move towards what's most important to us.

Imagine if you clicked on this episode in particular,

There's something in your life that maybe you want to work towards acceptance with,

Or you've had a profound experience of acceptance that maybe has opened you up a bit.

We're going to be talking about micro practices of acceptance,

Little tiny practices that show up in our everyday interactions with people and interactions with ourselves so that we can also be ready and prepared for the macro practice.

And I'll share examples for you of each.

So let's take a moment to look at what is and what is not acceptance.

One of the biggest mistakes that I make as a therapist and as a parent and as a friend and a daughter is pushing another person to accept when we're not on the same page about what it really means.

When I'm talking about acceptance,

I don't mean approval,

Being passive,

Allowing for harm,

Abuse or oppression,

Resigning or self-indulgence.

But rather when you look at the Latin word for accept,

It comes from the root to receive,

To receive what is offered.

So if the word acceptance makes you cringe,

Here are some alternative words that you could try on being willing,

Allowing,

Making space for,

Breathing into,

Letting go,

Being brave,

Letting it be,

Opening to life as it is,

Curiosity.

I think that those words encapsulate a little bit better what we're talking about when we're talking about acceptance.

When I think about acceptance,

I think about my eight-year-old learning how to swim.

And one of the first things that you need to be able to do to learn how to swim is to be willing to get wet.

And unfortunately for my eight-year-old,

That was sort of the thing he was trying not to do.

He didn't like the idea of wetness.

And with acceptance,

A lot of times there's just something that we don't like,

Something that we don't want,

That we are avoiding.

And that is fine.

If you don't care about learning how to swim,

Or maybe there's nothing about swimming that interests you,

You never have to accept getting wet.

But when there's something that you care about that your non-acceptance is preventing you from being able to do,

Then we have to learn some practices to be able to tolerate and open up to getting wet,

Whatever that getting wet is for you.

We spend a lot of our life on the side of the pool,

Looking in and avoiding trying to get wet.

And I know that you can relate to that.

There's maybe intimacy within a relationship that you want to pursue,

But it's uncomfortable,

So you don't move towards it.

Maybe there's a job change that you want to make,

But it would be scary.

You'd have to put yourself on the line.

You'd have to risk your ego.

You'd have to risk the feeling of rejection.

Or maybe there's a deep end of grief that you're terrified to move towards or climb into because you fear that it would just overtake you and overwhelm you.

When we learn the practice of acceptance,

We first just learn to float.

And once you can learn to float,

Once you can learn to open up and allow and make space and room for the wetness,

You don't get so engulfed in it.

It doesn't overtake you so that you can eventually flip yourself over and start to move your arms and your legs and swim.

So what does that mean tangibly?

Today we're going to talk about how to spot what acceptance is and what it isn't.

We're going to explore your cycles of avoidance,

The things that keep you on the edge of that pool and not dive into it.

And then I'm going to give you three practices that you can apply in your life to help cultivate greater acceptance.

So acceptance is one of the core processes involved in psychological flexibility.

It's one of those sides of the six-sided Rubik's cube that I talked about in our first episode.

And in ACT,

Acceptance is different than maybe what a lot of sort of in our vernacular we think of in terms of acceptance.

When I'm talking about acceptance,

I don't necessarily mean acceptance of the outer world,

Like accepting your brother-in-law.

What I'm talking about is acceptance of what is showing up under your skin when those difficult things show up in your life.

Kirk Strassl,

Who's one of the co-founders of ACT,

Talks about acceptance in terms of these five things.

TEAMS,

The acronym is TEAMS.

So T,

Acceptance of our thoughts.

E,

Acceptance of our emotions.

A,

Acceptance of our action urges,

Those sort of cravings that can show up.

M,

Acceptance of our memories.

And S,

Acceptance of our sensations.

In ACT,

We're talking about making room for and space for whatever shows up inside of ourselves in the present moment.

When I asked my mom,

Who's been married almost 50 years,

To my dad,

What is the secret to her marriage?

She said two things.

She said first that when she gets into a fight with my dad,

They have an agreement that the first person to drop it is the winner.

And then if you pick it up again and say,

I won because I dropped it first,

Then you're no longer the winner.

You have to be willing to drop it in order to win.

The second thing she said is acceptance that you cannot change another person.

When you find dental floss on the couch,

You let it go.

Whether you are stuck in an unhealthy behavior or you hold back from playing big in your life or maybe setting boundaries,

What acceptance does is it gives you the flexibility to be able to get into that wetness,

That discomfort,

So that you can move more freely towards being the type of person that you want to be in the world.

In the book,

Radical Acceptance,

Tara Brach describes acceptance as having sort of these two parts like wings of a bird,

Where one wing is being able to see clearly and the other is to hold our experience with compassion.

We take a look at what we're grasping or what we're running away from and we gently let go and we open up with care and with kindness.

I was recently in a workshop with Jack Kornfield and he talked about acceptance in meditation.

He said that in meditation,

It's inevitable that there's going to be sort of a restlessness that shows up.

When that restlessness shows up,

What we can do is we can just start by naming it restlessness.

It'll continue to show up and you just name it,

Gently whisper restlessness and come back to your breath.

Sometimes the restlessness is so loud and screaming and feels impossible that just naming it is not enough.

When that happens,

What he recommended was you say,

Okay,

Take me now,

Kill me,

Take me restlessness,

Take me.

You completely surrender to the restlessness.

You say,

I will be the first person to die of restlessness in my meditation.

In doing that,

In that complete surrender and that complete letting go,

You will find that you just become free of the restlessness.

This maps on to those sort of micro discomforts in life like restlessness during meditation,

But it also maps on to the bigger things in life like facing loss and grief or rejection.

That when we can be with ourselves in those moments and surrender to the experience,

Open up and allow for it,

We can find freedom.

Acceptance is actually doing what Tara Brach says of being able to see clearly and also have compassion for your experience so that you can make that wise decision of what to do next.

Acceptance research shows us that when we are practicing acceptance and in this particular,

This mindful type of acceptance,

It can attenuate the areas of our brain that are activated in experiences associated with pain,

Whether that's physical pain due to a temperature test or emotional pain,

Like watching a video of someone in pain.

When we practice mindful acceptance,

It changes our brain and in particular,

Those areas that are receptive to pain.

Another interesting thing is that when we practice acceptance,

It's more of a bottom up practice as opposed to a top down one,

Which means instead of trying to think our way into feeling differently,

We feel our way into having a relationship that's different with our discomfort.

And neuroscience research has shown that actually when people practice mindful awareness in response to an aversive stimuli,

Whether it's physical or emotional,

We don't see as much activation in the prefrontal cortex as we do with something like cognitive restructuring.

Third wave psychology,

Things like mindfulness based stress reduction,

Dialectical behavior therapy,

ACT,

Are using a lot of these acceptance based principles to help you be able to navigate the discomfort of living differently.

But this is something that you already know for yourself.

This is something that preschool teachers know when a parent leaves a child at school and the child starts to cry.

The preschool teacher doesn't give the child straight back to the mother,

But rather works with being present with the child long enough so that they can develop the skillset of acceptance of this new environment.

So I mentioned that we need to practice micro acceptance before we can move on to macro acceptance.

And one of the places where I've learned to practice micro acceptance is in my work.

I have a tendency to get anxious before new clients.

And this has been the case for 15 years,

Right?

A new client contacts me,

I'm anxious.

I call them back.

I'm anxious on the phone call.

They come to my office and I'm still anxious.

What I've learned to do with that anxiety is to expect it,

To know that it's there because it's linked to something that I care about.

And also know what I tend to do to try to manage the anxiety that actually prevents me from being the type of therapist that I want to be.

The ways in which I stand on the sidelines of the pool rather than getting wet with my clients,

Right?

So recently I had a client come to my office.

I've been seeing some folks outside on the porch at a distance.

And this client comes to my office and I'm having my normal bout of anxiety before seeing a new client.

And my office can be hard to find at first.

And so I walk out to go and meet her and I can feel the anxiety and I'm bringing it with me and bring it with me to meet her.

And we walk back to my office and I lead the way.

And as we get to my office,

My client says,

This is my new client that I've never met before says,

I think that you should fix your skirt.

And I look around and my skirt is completely tucked into my underpants,

Like complete bare bottom exposed.

And I have that moment of take me now,

As Jack Kornfield would say,

Take me now.

And in some ways that's it,

Right?

We all have our skirts tucked into our underpants to some degree or another,

But we try and pretend like we don't.

We go around the world covering up the things that make us vulnerable and the things that make us human.

Take me now.

And it's in that radical acceptance actually of just like surrendering that allows us to be able to move more freely in our lives.

Rick Hansen,

Who's been a mentor of mine for the past few years,

Gave me the recommendation when starting this podcast to practice renunciation.

The term renunciation sounds sort of not so great.

Who would want to renunciate?

But what he helped me understand is that in Buddhism,

Renunciation,

The term renunciation is really about realizing your basic goodness.

Renunciation is realizing that you already have exactly what you need and what you have is already good.

So what keeps us from acceptance or the opposite of acceptance is emotional avoidance or experiential avoidance is the term that we use in ACT.

And everybody has their flavor of experiential avoidance.

Recognizing your experiential avoidance is that first wing of the bird that Tara Brach talks about in terms of seeing clearly.

So take a look at the ways in which you are experientially avoiding,

The ways in which you're on the edge of the pool and not willing to get wet.

I'm going to list for you some of the experiential avoidance strategies that I see that are very common in my practice.

And maybe you can just on the palm of your hand,

Put a finger up for each one that you engage in.

And if you need to do use two hands,

Go ahead and use two hands.

So just take a listen,

Put your hands out and use your fingers to indicate whether or not you can relate.

When you're faced with discomfort,

Do you tend to strive?

Do you tend to overwork,

Overachieve,

Compete?

If so,

Put a finger up.

When faced with discomfort,

Do you tend to numb out?

Do you use food,

Over exercising,

Not eating,

Self-harm,

Substances so that you don't have to feel?

Do you brace with your body?

Do you hold your breath,

Clench your jaw,

Tense up,

Suck in your stomach?

Put a finger up.

When faced with discomfort,

Whether it's irritability or grief or anxiety or depression,

Do you try and distract?

Do you check out with technology?

Do you multitask or do you give up?

Do you opt out?

Do you isolate,

Get back in bed,

Don't go,

Don't sign up?

Put a finger up.

I've got five fingers so far.

I don't know about you.

I'm moving on to my next hand.

What about rushing through my personal favorite experiential avoidance strategy?

Do you try and just speed up to get through it all so that you don't have to feel like you're running over hot coals?

Do you stay busy?

Do you talk really quickly?

Put a finger up.

Or maybe you overthink things.

You wish for it to be different.

You problem solve.

You intellectualize.

And then a fan favorite I think of all of us right now is blaming.

Do you point fingers?

Do you judge?

Do you blame others?

Because it's too uncomfortable to experience the uncertainty in your life.

So these fingers that stand up in your hands right now are your experiential avoidance strategies.

And we all have them.

We all have them.

And I want you to put your hands with all those fingers up over your heart and take a breath and just acknowledge this is what it means to be human.

Brains avoid pain at all costs is what our brains are designed to do.

We're designed to avoid pain and move towards pleasure.

But when we engage in that avoidance,

We miss out on one of our key longings in life,

Which is the longing to feel.

Steve Hayes talks about the longings that underlie each one of these processes for us.

And the longing that underlies acceptance is the longing to feel,

To feel what it means to be human.

And when you start to see clearly that first wing of the bird of acceptance,

Of seeing clearly of your emotional and experiential avoidance strategies,

You can start to see clearly how,

Yes,

They protect you in the short term,

But in the long term,

They prevent you from really experiencing feeling,

Feeling fully in your life.

And it also prevents you from getting in the water and taking that swim because there's something that you care about,

Something that you want for yourself,

A way of being in the world.

Maybe you want deeper connections with people.

Maybe you want a deeper connection and understanding of yourself.

And when you're caught up in experiential and emotional avoidance,

You're so busy fixing your skirt or your hair or your photo or your life that you miss out on living it.

So the first practice of acceptance is seeing clearly,

Getting clear on what your emotional and experiential avoidance strategy is and seeing how it's keeping you in a cycle of stuckness.

And you can see that at the micro level,

The little tiny things you're doing to adjust and shift and avoid throughout your day and at the macro level.

A lot of times with non-acceptance,

What we do is we go straight to sort of defending intention.

I didn't intend to harm you.

I'm a good person.

I wouldn't make a racist comment.

I'm a good person.

I wouldn't make a sexist or an able-bodied comment.

I'm a good person.

I wouldn't make a comment to my partner that is harmful to them.

But in our attempts to defend or rationalize or talk about our intention,

What we're actually doing is experientially avoiding and we're spiritually avoiding the discomfort of holding space for the person that we've harmed and holding space for their harm.

And one of the practices that I'm really learning to do,

Whether it's with my kids or my husband or with people of different backgrounds than me is to pause and not go into the experiential avoidance,

But actually go into the feeling state and apologize for the harm that I've done and be with the harm that I've done when I do harm.

So that's a practice of acceptance,

Right?

An example of how seeing clearly and see our subtle emotional avoidance strategies prevent us from being the type of person we want to be in the world.

So I talked to you about sort of the micro and macro experiences of acceptance and that the first practice is really seeing clearly the first wing of the bird.

And the second wing,

The other wing of the bird is what does that look like to accept?

And I believe that we practice acceptance with our mind.

We practice acceptance with our body and we practice acceptance with our behavior.

So I want to try on those three practices of acceptance with the mind,

The body and the behavior.

And Debbie Sorensen and I,

When we wrote the ACT Daily Journal,

That's how we really broke it down into teaching this acceptance piece.

So if you're interested in learning more about sort of some daily practices you can do with acceptance,

I would recommend ACT Daily Journal,

Go check it out.

It's a great resource.

I love some of the research that's looking at pain in our brain and really seeing how whether it's emotional pain or it's physical pain,

It activates the same areas of the brain.

And so sometimes it's helpful to use physical pain as an example for how we could work with acceptance because we kind of,

Sometimes it's easier to kind of wrap our head around.

One of the practices that I took up during the pandemic that a lot of people took up was Wim Hof breathing.

And Wim Hof breathing because it's supposed to activate some of the sort of good hormetic stress on our system.

Hormesis being sort of a little bit of stress on your body can actually strengthen your body.

What you do in Wim Hof breathing is you breathe in rapidly for about 30 breaths and then you breathe all your air out and you hold your breath out at the bottom for as long as possible to the point where you just feel like you're about to explode.

And then you take a deep breath in and hold that retention for about 15 seconds and then you repeat.

And over time you become better and stronger at being able to hold that long breath out.

Alyssa Epple and others are starting to look at some of the benefits of this type of breathing on your longevity markers,

Things like telomeres,

As well as your immunity and other things.

But for me,

What was really helpful in the practice of Wim Hof breathing was being able to learn about what happens to my mind when I am holding my breath.

And it's interesting because under other circumstances,

If someone were forcing me to put my head under water,

Then I would consider that torture.

But here I am,

I am choosing to do this.

So acceptance has a lot to do with choice,

Right?

And when we think about acceptance with our mind,

This first part of acceptance,

We are choosing to accept by cultivating a yes brain as Dan Siegel would call it.

There's actually a book called The Yes Brain by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson that I used a lot with my kids when they were little.

And the yes brain is a brain that is flexible and curious and adaptable and willing to try new things,

Even make new mistakes.

It's open to the world and relationships.

And when we practice a yes brain,

We're actually practicing acceptance.

We're doing a yes.

So if you can imagine,

And you could even practice this,

Do a little Wim Hof tomorrow morning when you wake up.

Alyssa Epple,

Who I have spoken with a bit,

She recommends about three times a week,

We'd be doing this Wim Hof breathing to have its benefits.

But see if when you're on that extended exhale,

When it gets really uncomfortable,

How it's different when you start to say yes to it versus no to it.

How it feels differently when you say in your mind,

Yes.

Think about something for yourself right now that's uncomfortable to accept.

Bring it into your mind.

And imagine it right in front of you and say no,

No,

No,

No.

What happens?

Imagine that same thing in front of you in your mind.

You can cultivate the imagery of that thing that's difficult to accept.

And this time,

What I want you to say is yes.

Yes,

Yes,

Yes.

Notice how it's a little different.

So when I start to bring yes to my holding out of my breath,

I actually can hold my breath longer than when I say no to it and I resist it.

And as I mentioned before,

These areas of your brain that are activated with pain,

There's not a whole lot of discernment between physical pain and emotional pain.

The same is true when I say yes to things like my anxiety or I say yes to things like sadness or loss.

I can stay with it a little bit longer and it really changes my relationship with it.

So with acceptance and acceptance and commitment therapy,

We are not talking about changing that thing.

We're actually not talking about changing the discomfort,

But we're talking about changing our relationship with this discomfort,

Making enough space to be able to hold it.

Getting wet.

You can't swim if you don't get wet.

Rule number one.

So you got to say yes and you got to jump in.

That's the first step.

But then the second part,

The second step that I want to teach you is about acceptance with the body.

As I mentioned before,

The first thing they teach you when you learn how to swim is to get into starfish pose and float at the top of the pool.

And part of the reason why they teach that to kids is because if the kid falls into the deep end of the pool,

We want them to be able to not exert all of their energy if they don't know how to swim to the point that they end up drowning.

Basically floating on your back so that you don't exert your energy and non-acceptance.

We know it's exhausting to not accept.

Well,

Allow the child to be in the pool long enough so that an adult or someone could find them and maybe rescue them.

But when you become an adult,

It's you that's going to rescue you.

It's no one else out there that's going to rescue you.

So you float on your back,

You learn how to accept and open up with your body so that you can be in a space where you could actually rescue yourself.

You can relate to your pain and discomfort differently and find what's underneath it for you and then be able to swim towards what's important.

So the second step is sort of the starfish pose of it all.

And accepting with our body can mean bringing in a curious stance.

Maybe even thinking about that thing that you don't want to accept,

The thing that's uncomfortable for you,

The skirt that's tucked into your underwear.

What does it feel like inside your body?

Where is it located?

Noticing if it had a shape or a color,

If it's on one side more than the other,

Or if it has a weight.

Bringing your awareness to just that,

A loving,

Open awareness to just hold that.

Accepting with your body.

It's letting go of your face,

As my favorite yoga teacher,

Eddie says,

Let go of your face.

Let go of your face.

It's letting go of your shoulders.

It's letting go of your belly.

It's opening your hands,

Palms up to receive.

Many practices of meditation,

We do palms up on our lap when we want to receive.

So with acceptance of our body,

It's a very bottom up practice.

It's an embodied practice of climbing inside,

Breathing into and around and making space for whatever is showing up for you right now.

And remembering with that sort of idea of renunciation that you already have exactly what you need.

What you have is already good.

So making space for that goodness as well,

Alongside the pain.

So that's your second practice.

First we say yes with our mind,

We get wet,

And then we say yes to what is,

And then second,

We accept with our bodies.

And then the third practice is accepting with our behavior.

And oftentimes accepting with our behavior is doing the opposite of what our mind is telling us to do.

There is a term in dialectical behavior therapy called opposite to emotion action.

Sometimes accepting with our behavior is moving towards what's making us anxious because what we care about is in that same direction.

Acceptance with our behavior is flipping our bodies over in the water and putting our face in it so that we can begin to move our arms and our feet and swim towards what we care about.

There's a beautiful song by Lila June Johnson,

Who's an indigenous public speaker and artist and scholar and community organizer of Navajo and Cheyenne and European lineages.

And in the song,

She sings about water.

And one of her lines is that we are people of the water.

She says,

You can say water is life,

But can you live it?

When you accept with your behavior,

You start to become the water itself.

You can start to move and flow freely in your life.

And you start to see that your actions can be decoupled from your emotions.

Sometimes your actions are the opposite of your emotions.

You can wake up in the morning and accept the feeling of discomfort of waking up early and still get out of bed and move towards your morning practice or your exercise program or get ready for work,

Even though your head and your body say no.

You can practice acceptance with a yes brain.

Or sometimes your emotions and your inner world are calling for you to listen and asking you for you to pause and be so that you can actually use them to guide your behavior.

Maybe you have a longing for a job change or a longing for a relationship shift or a longing to make peace with your own trauma.

So what that looks like with your behavior,

Acceptance with your behavior is really living a towards values lifestyle,

Opening up and allowing for whatever shows up along the way,

Not drowning in your discomfort and not standing on the sidelines either,

But really getting clear on your values as we did in the first podcast and moving in the direction of those values.

I mentioned that there's micro and macro practices of this.

And as I close,

I want to share a macro practice that I've been undergoing for the past,

Gosh,

I think year and a half now of acceptance.

My husband who is a lover of hawks,

I think it's his spirit animal.

We live in a canyon and these hawks often circle around our property.

And he calls me up to come outside and look at the red tail hawks from time to time.

And one day he called me up to the house and I sort of rolled my eyes thinking that it was another hawk to look out.

And I was busy and had some notes to write.

And I went up to the house and he looked at me and he said,

Honey,

I can't see part of your face.

I can't see part of your face.

Fast forward a number of doctors appointments and diagnostics and confusion and clarity.

We came to learn that he has a progressive vision loss and that he will never get that vision back.

And then it's likely that vision loss will continue.

So radical acceptance is seeing clearly and then opening up with our mind,

Our body and our behavior to what is.

Seeing clearly is seeing the impermanence of the present moment.

And the second wing of opening up with your mind and your body and your behavior is letting go of what's not important.

Allowing and being willing and being curious about what is present right here and now.

And what's the longing underneath it?

What is the gift inside of the pain?

And I will say for myself,

The gift inside of the pain of my husband's vision loss has been a closeness and an intimacy and in recognition of what's most important in my life.

One of the teachings that I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh over 20 years ago is the teaching of the five remembrances.

And what Thay teaches is to wake up every morning and to practice saying statements that remind you of five things.

The first is remembering that you are aging and you are going to grow old.

The second is remembering that you are going to get sick.

The third is remembering that you will die.

The fourth is remembering that everything you love and everyone you love is changing.

It is all changing and that we will lose all of it at some point.

And then the fifth remembrance is that really your only belongings are your actions.

So this comes from Buddhist teachings that are translated by Thich Nhat Hanh into these five remembrances.

Four of those five remembrances are about acceptance.

And I would say four of those five remembrances have showed up intimately for you in the past few years over the course of this pandemic.

You've had to make close contact with your impermanence,

Your vulnerability,

And if not the vulnerability of being close to losing your life,

Most likely the vulnerability of everything you love being changed.

And when we can make contact and open up and accept the impermanence of everything,

The changing nature of everything,

Then we start to look at how powerful and important our actions are.

And that's what ACT is sort of all about.

It's acceptance and commitment therapy.

It's with the acceptance that then we can commit.

So I hope that this practice of acceptance,

That you will do it on the micro level and you will learn to do it over and over again in your daily life so that you can bring it to the macro level.

There's a ground to stand on when we practice acceptance.

There's a spaciousness to be in.

To summarize today's talk,

We talked about acceptance.

We talked about what acceptance is and what it is not.

We talked about the different types of traditions that all point to acceptance as being foundational in our wellness,

Whether it's neuroscience,

Third wave psychology or contemplative wisdom.

And we talked about the two wings of the bird of acceptance that come from Tara Brach,

The wing of seeing clearly,

Noticing your experiential avoidance strategies so that then you can practice the second wing,

Which is to be with,

To be present with and open up and allow with your brain,

With your body and with your behavior.

And throughout I used a metaphor of swimming in the water.

For your practice this week,

Here's what I would like you to do.

I would like you to do a micro acceptance practice.

I'd like for you to be aware when you notice yourself resisting what is,

And when you get caught in one of those experiential avoidance strategies,

Catch yourself,

Catch yourself.

And then practice one of those three practices.

Either just say silently to yourself,

Yes.

Yes to what is.

Or practice letting go with your body,

Accepting and opening up with open palms,

Open heart,

Open belly,

Open face.

Or practicing acceptance with your behavior,

Choosing that towards values lifestyle,

Even in the presence of what's uncomfortable.

Let me know how it works for you.

I'll see you over on Instagram.

Let me know there in the comment section and many blessings in practicing your acceptance this week.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Your Life in Process.

When you enter your life in process,

When you become psychologically flexible,

You become free.

If you liked this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody,

Please leave a review over at podchaser.

Com.

If you have any questions,

You can leave them for me by phone at 805-457-2776 or by email at podcast at your life in process.

Com.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatment.

Reviews

Absolutely brilliant and beautifully presented thanks

Thank Diana for this incredibly useful tool. Recovering from a severe shoulder surgery with pins and plates and hours daily of PT, initially I was trying to zone out during PT watching videos, listening to audiobooks, then realized that this was a perfect time to practice. I appreciate the podcast. They've turned my approach to my physical therapy around.

Thank you for being real and complete.

Yes to acceptance, beautifully encapsulated in your talk! As a soon-to-be retired psychiatrist, I have had a fair amount of exposure to both DBT and ACT but am always the learner and still growing. Thanks for your work!