Acceptance

Acceptance means consciously allowing things to be as they are. It involves letting go of the desire to protest and make change. Acceptance meditation can help recognize feelings in the present moment and view experiences more compassionately.

Guided Meditation For Self-Acceptance

This 10-minute guided meditation will help you increase self-acceptance. Successful mindfulness practice involves learning to accept the present as it is.

This is a 10 minute guided meditation that is meant to help you start your day in a calm and loving way. This is day four of our full meditation series and in this video, we will be focusing on self-acceptance. With the idea of finding acceptance in every situation that we encounter in our lives, for ourselves and our current place in life.

In meditation, one of the methods that help anchor ourselves is focusing your mind on a specific mantra. The mantra becomes a wonderful tool to pull you back when your mind wanders and to allow your mind to explore the depths and emotions surrounding that idea at the same time. In this video, I will be providing you with a mantra or centering thought for you to carry through your meditation and into the rest of your day.

“I am doing enough. I have enough. I am enough”.

When you start your meditation practice it’s easy to not know what to expect or even to expect something from it as you might get from anything else you “do” in life. But meditation is not a “doing”, it is a “being”. It is learning to find stillness and peace within the idea that the moment you are in, the moment you are experiencing right at that moment is enough.

The trick is that our minds are not used to this way of thinking. Our modern-day lives & culture tend to clutter our conscious thoughts with projections and stress towards the future and the past. Meditation helps us learn to let go. Meditation to me, and what I would like to share with you, is about bathing in the now. And finding peace with exactly who you are, where you are, and that all other chatter in your head can and eventually will be cleansed by the regular practice and training of momentary awareness.

When you start your mind is not used to this. It will fight back and flare up with thoughts and wander and tell you it’s boring and you should stop. These are all normal experiences. Always. The trick is to breathe it in when it happens, see it happening, and exhale it out only to reset your focus again. It’s not a failure. It’s just what happened. And in time it will happen less and less as your focus and mind become more and more accustomed to quiet, peace, and stillness.
More than anything in life, there is no result when you meditate. It is just acceptance. And you.

If you have ever wondered how to meditate? Or were curious about meditation challenges. Wanted to know how to breathe when meditating? How to clear your thoughts? How to bring more abundance and positivity into your life? This guided meditation will help.

There are so many great benefits to meditation once you truly learn to love the process and practice it daily. Through meditation, you will slowly begin to achieve more patience in your everyday life, how to appreciate the simple things, and how to find the space in your mind to spread more love and kindness into the world around you.

Find a comfortable seated position, relax, and follow along on this peaceful and stress releasing mediation for beginners.

Guided Meditation: Self Acceptance

In the modern era, we all have a tendency to want to “become” something. This is putting it quite simply, but the issue itself is actually very complex. It’s important to understand this tendency if we want to improve with our mindfulness practice.

We’re raised with the belief that we need to achieve something and become something new. We need to make something of ourselves. We’re supposed to earn more money than our parents did. We’re supposed to achieve a higher degree in college or graduate school. We’re supposed to take on a certain occupation that other people perceive as a sign of success. We’re supposed to own a certain kind of house, drive a certain kind of car, wear certain kinds of clothes, and do certain kinds of things for fun.

All of these expectations can often go unstated, but they’re there. They drive many of us to strive and struggle throughout our lives, always looking to the “next thing” that we’re going to achieve, buy, or become: the thing that will finally make us happy.

In this meditation, you’ll be guided in the direction of self-acceptance. You’ll practice acknowledging where you stand, and accepting your current state for what it is. Beyond that, you’ll learn to appreciate where you are now. You’ll practice putting an end to the striving that’s constantly trying to take you somewhere different.

A big part of successful mindfulness practice involves being fully present and learning to be satisfied with the present moment. When we’re fully present, we realize that there’s nothing to want for: nothing to achieve, and nothing to become. We’re already perfect right now, exactly as we are. Once you fully accept this and come to truly believe it, you’ll experience greater joy, peace, compassion, and calm in your life. You’ll live with greater clarity, and you’ll appreciate every moment.

Lower Stress Through Meditation Focused on Acceptance

Finances, family, work, and especially, rush hour traffic. These all contribute to a US population that is constantly on edge and stressed by the 24-hour cycle of life. And this is without discussing politics. American adults experience stress in many ways and combat it through a variety of methods — from medications to alcohol to exercise.

Meditation has been shown to help in stress reduction, and westernized mind-body practices are in vogue more than ever. But there’s one aspect of meditation in particular that might prove best for beating stress: a focus on openness and equanimity, known as acceptance training.

A Carnegie Mellon University-led study offers the first scientific evidence that mindfulness meditation that included acceptance training techniques can reduce cortisol levels and blood pressure in response to stressful situations.

“Our study showed the importance of developing and practicing this accepting attitude towards experiences,” said Emily Lindsay, leader of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. “And the practice is very doable,” Lindsay said. “We saw significant differences in stress responses from just 20-minutes per day for 14 days.”

Acceptance training is believed to target equanimity, and help people view experiences with less judgment and criticism. “We wanted to know ‘what is it about mindfulness that drives stress reduction?’” said David Creswell, associate professor at CMU Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “We theorized that acceptance training — fostering a capacity to be open and curious, and developing an accepting attitude — might be that active ingredient.”

Published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, the study assigned 153 stressed adults to one of three smartphone-based interventions: one that received training in both present moment awareness and acceptance techniques, one that focused on present moment awareness and a control group that didn’t learn any mindfulness techniques at all. Participants completed one 20-minute daily lesson for two weeks. Then they were asked to deliver a 5-minute speech and solve advanced, mental math problems in front of a critical audience — highly stressful for most American adults. Their cortisol levels and blood pressure were measured.

Results revealed that participants in the combined awareness and acceptance arm of the trial had the lowest cortisol and blood pressure levels. Blood pressure levels were approximately 20 percent lower while cortisol responses measured 50 percent lower than those participants who did not have acceptance training.

“Not only were we able to show that acceptance is a critical part of mindfulness training, but we’ve demonstrated that a smartphone-based mindfulness program helps to reduce the impact of stress,” said Lindsay. 

The study proved the accessibility of a unified mindfulness method for first-time users. None of the 153 participants had a yoga or meditation practice; everyone really started from square one. Lindsay and Creswell partnered with leading mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young, who developed the app for the study. Young and his team have partnered with many mindfulness studies, and generally create a bridge between the worlds of yoga/meditation and tech/science.

“Folks, overall, loved the program Shin-zen developed,” said Creswell. “The instructions for developing and implementing these specific skills were very concrete.” This was exemplified in the study’s low dropout rate. Of the 153 participants, 150 completed all lessons.

Most mindfulness apps use some sort of acceptance training component. Phone apps such as Headspace, Bright mind, Mindful, and others offer an easy introduction for first-timers without the risks of having to pay for a class, buy a book, or make a pilgrimage to India. “Having a structure in place is important,” says Lindsay. “Oftentimes, people aren’t sure if they are ‘doing it right’.”

Building a foundation is important, but developing a mindfulness practice that revolves around your phone might seem a bit paradoxical. Screen time of any kind usually makes us less mindful. And studies have shown that just having your phone out and present in a conversation can significantly interfere with your sense of connection and feelings of closeness with another person.

“An in-person mindfulness program is preferred,” said Lindsay. “But more people have access to apps now.” The hope now is to spread mindfulness to a wider audience and phone apps might be that entry point.

But however people decide to take up a mind body practice, Lindsay says the focus should be on sticking with it. “It ultimately takes time to develop these skills,” said Lindsay. “It takes dedication.”

How to Practice Acceptance for Mindfulness

Acceptance turns out to be one of the most helpful attitudes to bring to mindfulness. Acceptance means perceiving your experience and simply acknowledging it rather than judging it as good or bad. For some people, the word ‘acceptance’ is off-putting – replace it with the word ‘acknowledgement,’ if you prefer.

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. This doesn’t mean, ‘If you think you can’t do something, accept it’ – that would be giving up rather than accepting. Acceptance refers to your experience from moment to moment.

For example, when you feel pain, whether it’s physical, such as a painful shoulder, or mental, such as depression or anxiety, the natural reaction is to try to avoid feeling the pain. This seems very sensible because the sensation of physical or mental pain is unpleasant. You ignore it, distract yourself, or perhaps even go so far as turning to recreational drugs or alcohol to numb the discomfort.

This avoidance may work in the immediate short term, but before long, avoidance fails in the mental and emotional realm.

You still feel the pain, but on top of that, you feel the emotional hurt and struggle with the pain itself. Buddha called this the ‘second arrow.’ If a warrior is injured by an arrow and unleashes A thought like ‘why did this happen to me,’ that’s a ‘second arrow.’

You may inflict this on yourself each time you feel some form of pain or even just a bit of discomfort, rather than accepting what has happened and taking the next step. Avoidance – running away – is an aspect of the ‘second arrow’ and compounds the suffering. Acceptance means stopping fighting with your moment-to-moment experience. Acceptance removes that second arrow of blame, criticism or denial.

Perhaps you sit down to meditate and feel bombarded by thoughts dragging you away again and again. If you don’t accept the fact that your mind likes thinking, you become more and more frustrated, upset and annoyed with yourself. You want to focus on the meditation but just can’t.

In the above example:

• First arrow – lots of thoughts entering your mind during meditation.
• Second arrow – not accepting that thoughts are bound to come up in meditation. Criticizing yourself for having too many thoughts.
• Solution – to acknowledge and accept that thoughts are part and parcel of meditation. You can do this by gently saying to yourself ‘thinking is happening’ or ‘it’s natural to think’ or simply labeling it as ‘thinking…thinking.’

By acknowledging the feeling, thought or sensation and going into it, the experience changes. Even with physical pain, try experimenting by actually feeling it. Research has found that the pain reduces. But remember, you’re not acknowledging it to get rid of the feeling. That’s not acceptance. You need to acknowledge the sensation, feeling or thought without trying to change it at all. Pure acceptance of it, just as it is.

One way to relax into the discomfort is by courageously turning to the sensation of discomfort, and simultaneously feeling the sensation of your own breath. With each out-breath, allow yourself to move closer and soften the tension around the discomfort.

If all this acceptance or acknowledgement of your pain seems impossible, just try getting a sense of it and make the tiniest step towards it. The smallest step towards acceptance can set up a chain of events ultimately leading towards transformation. Any tiny amount of acceptance is better than none at all.

Another aspect of acceptance is to come to terms with your current situation. If you’re lost, even if you have a map of where you want to get to, you have no hope of getting there, if you don’t know where you are to start with.

You need to know and accept where you are before you can begin working out how to get to where you want to be. Paradoxically, acceptance is the first step for any radical change. If you don’t acknowledge where you are and what’s currently happening, you can’t move on appropriately from that point.

• Gently state the label of the experience you aren’t accepting. For example, if you’re not accepting that you’re angry, state in your mind, to yourself, ‘I’m feeling angry at the moment… I’m feeling angry.’ In this way, you begin to acknowledge your feeling.
• Notice which part of your body feels tense and imagine your breath going into and out of the area of tightness. As you breathe in and out, say to yourself, ‘It’s okay. It’s already here… It’s already here.’
• Consider how much you accept or acknowledge your current thoughts/feelings/sensation on a scale of 1 to 10. Ask yourself what you need to do to increase your acceptance by 1, and then do it as best you can.
• Become really curious about your experience. Consider: ‘Where did this feeling come from? Where do I feel it? What’s interesting about it?’ In this way, the curiosity leads you to a little more acceptance.