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. Diana shares practices you can do with your mind, body, and behavior to cultivate a greater willingness to experience uncertainty and discomfort.

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Thank you to the team Craig, Ashley Hiatt, and Yoko Nguyen. Thank you to Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

We can put our energy where it matters most and savor the good along the way.

I believe that if there's one skill in life that will offer you

Acceptance is central to maintaining healthy relationships, to making a

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

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

I wanted to share with you ideas from psychology and contemplative

And probably one of the most important practices that we can

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

It's given all of us one and in a lot of ways, this virus is a messenger

And imagine if you clicked on this episode in particular, there's

Or you've had a profound experience of acceptance that

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

interactions with people and interactions with ourselves, so that we can also be

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

When I'm talking about acceptance, I don't mean approval being passive,

But rather when you look at the Latin word for, except it comes from the root

So if the word acceptance makes you cringe, here are some alternative words

allowing, making space for, breathing into, letting go, being brave, letting it

I think that those words encapsulate a little bit better what we're talking

When I think about acceptance, I think about my eight year

And one of the first things that you need to be able to do to learn how

And unfortunately, for my eight year old, that was sort of the

He didn't like the idea of a wetness.

And with acceptance, a lot of times there's just something that

And that is fine if you don't care about learning how to swim, or maybe there is

But when there is something that you care about that your nonacceptance is

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn't overtake you so that you can eventually flip yourself over and start

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 sort of your cycles of avoidance, the

And then I'm going to give you three practices that you can apply in your life

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

acceptance is different than maybe what a lot of, sort of in our vernacular,

When I'm talking about acceptance, I don't necessarily mean acceptance of the outer

What I'm talking about is acceptance of what is showing up under

Kirk Strosahl, who's one of the co-founders of ACT, talks about

So T acceptance of our thoughts.

E, acceptance of our emotions.

A acceptance of our action urges, those sorts 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

When I asked my mom, who's been married almost 50 years to my dad,

She said two things.

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

And then if you pick it up again and say, I won because I dropped it first,

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 stock and an unhealthy behavior, or you hold back from playing

able to get into that wetness, that discomfort so that you can move more

In the book Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach describes acceptances having sort of these

And the other is to hold our experience with compassion.

We take a look at what we're grasping or what we're running

And we open up with care and with kindness.

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

And he said that in meditation, it's inevitable that there's going to be

And when that restlessness shows up, what we can do is we

Restlessness.

It'll continue to show up and you just name it gently, whisper, restlessness.

And come back to your breath.

But sometimes the restlessness is so loud and screaming and feels impossible

And when that happens, what he recommended was you say, okay, take me now.

Kill me.

Take me restlessness, take me.

And you completely surrender to the restlessness.

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

And in doing that, in that complete surrender and that complete letting

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

But it also maps on to the bigger things in life, like facing

That when we can be with ourselves in those moments and surrender

Acceptance is actually doing what Tara Brach says of being able to see

Neuroscience research shows us that when we are practicing acceptance and

of acceptance, it can attenuate the areas of our brain that are activated

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

And in particular, those areas that are receptive to pain.

Another interesting thing is that when we practice acceptance, it's more of

of trying to think our way out of, into feeling differently, we feel

That's different with our discomfort and neuroscience research has

practice mindful awareness and response to an aversive stimuli,

We don't see as much activation in the prefrontal cortex as we do with

Mindfulness-based stress reduction, dialectical behavior therapy act are

But this is something that you already know for yourself.

This is something that preschool teachers know when a parent leaves a child at

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

with the child long enough so that they can develop the skillset of

So I mentioned that we need to practice micro acceptance before

And one of the places where.

Learn to practice.

Micro acceptance is in my work.

I have a tendency to get anxious before new clients, and this has

And 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

that actually prevents me from being the type of therapist that I want to be the

With my clients, right?

So recently I had a client come to my office.

I've been seeing some, 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

And so I walk out to go and meet her and I can feel I can feel the

And we walked back to my office and I lead the way and as we get to my

Says, I think that you should fix your skirt.

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

I have that moment of take me now as Jack cornfield 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,

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 surrender.

That allows us to be able to move more freely in our lives.

Rick Hanson, who's been a mentor of mine for the past few years, gave me

The term renunciation sounds sort of not so great, uh, who would

Buddhism, renunciation, the term pronunciation is really about

Renunciation is realizing that you already have exactly what you need

So what keeps us from acceptance or the opposite of acceptance is emotional

And everybody has their flavor of experiential avoidance.

Recognizing your experiential avoidance is that first wing of

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

I'm going to list for you.

Some of the experiential avoidance strategies that I see that are

And maybe you can just on the Palm of your hand, put a finger up

And if you need to do two hands, go ahead and use two hands.

So just take a listen, put your hands out and use your fingers to

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

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

Do you check out with technology?

Do you multitask or do you give up, do you opt out?

Do you.

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.

And moving on to my next hand, what about rushing through my personal

Do you try and just speed up to get through it all so that you don't have to

Do you stay busy?

Do you talk really quickly put a finger up or maybe you overthink

You problem solve you and 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

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

This is what it means to be human humans, 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

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

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

yes, they protect you in the short term, but in the longterm, they

And it also prevents you from getting in the water and taking that swim,

Maybe you want deeper connections with people.

Maybe you want a deeper connection, an understanding of yourself.

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

So the first practice of acceptance is seeing clearly getting clear on

And you can see that at the micro level, the little tiny things you're doing to

A lot of times with non-acceptance, what we do is we, we go straight

I didn't attack 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

doing is experientially avoiding and we're experience really avoiding that discomfort

And one of the practices that I'm really learning to do, whether it's with my

avoidance, but actually go into the feeling state and apologize for the

So that's a, that's a practice of acceptance, right?

An example of how seeing clearly and see our subtle emotional avoidance

So I talked to you about sort of the micro and macro experiences of acceptance and

clearly the first wing of the bird and the second wing, the other wing of the bird

And I believe that we practice acceptance with our mind.

We've practiced the substance with our body and we practice

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

And Debbie Sorenson and I, when we wrote the Act Daily Journal, that's

So if you're interested in learning more about sort of some daily practices you

It's a great resource.

I love some of research.

That's looking at, um, pain in our brain and really seeing how, whether it's

And so sometimes it's helpful to use physical pain as an example for how

One of the, one of the practices that I took up during the pandemic that a lot

and Wim Hof breathing, because it's supposed to activate some of the, um, sort

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

What you do in Wim Hof Breathing is you breathe in rapidly for about 30 breaths,

you hold your breath out at the bottom for as long as possible to the point where you

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

Elissa Epel and others are starting to look at some of the benefits of this type

But for me, what was really helpful in the practice of Wim Hof breathing was

And it's interesting because under other circumstances, if someone were

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

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

And the yes, brain is, is a brain that is flexible and curious, and

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

Elissa Epel, who I have spoken with, um, a bit says she recommends

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

How it feels differently when you say in your mind, yes.

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

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

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

And I resist.

And as I mentioned before, these areas of your brain that are activated with

The same is true when I say yes to things like my anxiety, or I say

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

So with acceptance in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we are not

We're actually not talking about changing the discomfort, but we're talking

You can't swim.

If you don't get wet rule number one, So you got to say

That's the first step.

But then the second part, the second step that I want to teach you is

As I mentioned before, the first thing they teach you when you learn

And part of the reason why they teach that to kids is because if the kid falls

them to be able to not exert all of their energy, if they don't know how to swim

Actually floating on your back so that you don't exert your energy and nonacceptance.

We know it's exhausting to not accept will allow the child to be in the pool

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

You can relate to your pain and discomfort differently and find what's

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,

The thing that's uncomfortable for you.

The, 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

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.

Is 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 remembering with that sort of idea of renunciation that you

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, with our mind.

We get wet.

And then we exp 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

There's a term in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy called Opposite to Emotion Action.

Sometimes accepting with our behavior is moving towards what's making

Acceptance with our behavior is flipping our bodies over in the water and

There's a beautiful song by Lyla June Johnson who's an indigenous public

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

practice or your exercise program, or get ready for work, even though

You can practice acceptance with a yes brain.

Or sometimes your emotions and your inner world are calling for you to listen.

And asking for you to pause and be so that you can actually use

Maybe you have a longing for a job change or a longing for a

So what that looks like with your behavior, acceptance with

Opening up and allowing for whatever shows up along the way, not drowning

getting clear on your values as we did in the first podcast and moving

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

And as I close, I want to share a macro practice that I have been

My husband, who is a lover of hawks, I think it's his, it's his spirit animal.

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

And one day, he called me up to the house and I sort of rolled my eyes thinking

And I was, I was busy and had some notes to write and I went up to the

I can't see part of your face.

Fast forward, a number of doctor's appointments and, um, diagnostics

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,

Seeing clearly as seeing the impermanence of the present moment and the second

Allowing and being willing and being curious about what is

What is the gift inside of the pain?

And I will say for myself, the gift inside of the pain of my husband's

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

And what Thay teaches is to wake up every morning and to, to practice saying

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 a remembering that everything you love and

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

So this comes from Buddhist teachings that are translated by Thich Nhat

Four of those five remembrances are about acceptance.

And I would say four of those five remembrances have showed up intimately

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

being close to losing your life, most likely the vulnerability of

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

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

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

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

And we talked about the two wings of the bird of acceptance that come

can practice the second wing, which is to be with, to be present with an

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

For your practice this week, here's what I would like to 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

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 and

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

If you like this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody, please leave

for me by phone at (805) 457-2776 or by email at podcast@yourlifeinprocess.com

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