You’ve been resisting in three places, not one

A patient told me her acceptance practice was “mostly a head experience.” She was right.

(Part 1 of 2)

“It’s mostly a head experience.” A patient said this to me recently, describing an affirmation she’d been using to try to accept her anxiety. She’d been repeating it to herself for weeks and could tell that there was something that wasn’t quite right; by the way it was landing in her body, it wasn’t reaching the part of her that needed it.

Acceptance is a word that gets used so often in clinics and meditation apps and self-help books that by the time it reaches a person who is actually struggling, it can land more like an instruction than an invitation (maybe even a command!). Just accept it. Anyone who has been told to just accept chronic pain, or grief, or a difficult diagnosis knows how that sentence feels.

I’ll get into what acceptance actually is in Part 2 of this series. But before I can do that, it’s important to spend some time with its opposite: resistance. Why? Because resistance turns out to be much more interesting/challenging/important than it seems on the surface. Most of us think we know what resisting our experience means. What I’ve found, working with patients over the years, is that a whole lot of everything that we do when we think we’re not resisting is, in fact, another version of resistance dressed up as something different so it can hide itself. My patient’s affirmation was one of those versions. She just hadn’t seen it yet.