In these cases, the best thing one can do is accept what happened. Acceptance is one of the key concepts of many spiritual traditions and represents the basic attitude behind most meditation practices. It means accepting what happened in the past and what is happening in the present moment without judging and being entangled in the experience.
Some people may misunderstand the meaning of acceptance, confusing it with surrender, and the concept of acceptance becomes synonymous with surrender to pain, powerlessness, and failure, which is the most negative form of acceptance; this is not what we talk about.
We propose a positive concept of surrender in the sense of stopping and facing what is happening to respond better to the situation. This is what we will clarify later in this article, and how surrender is one of the best forms of dealing with the situation, which will help you:
- Letting go of unpleasant emotions.
- Calmly handling difficult and unpredictable situations.
- Dissolving psychological problems.
The dangers of non-acceptance
According to recent studies by researchers David Barlow and Steven Hayes, one of the main causes of internal suffering is linked to emotional avoidance, the habit of not accepting the unpleasant emotions one feels.
Although it can lead to temporary relief, this emotional resistance tends to intensify the problems in the long term. The habitual tendency to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and emotions is associated with many problems.
In addition, ignoring the emotions you feel limits your potential to live a good life. For example, if you are shy and do not overcome it, you will start avoiding social events, reducing your quality of life.
Ignoring what we feel is a very negative thing because it entails a denial of facts. Reality will not change just because you deny it; by contrast, it can cause you to ignore major problems in the long term.
Finger trap game
This Chinese game consists of a tube of intertwined straws. The game begins by inserting the index finger from both hands at both ends of the tube. When the player tries to get their finger out, the tube narrows, and the fingers are confined inside it.
Getting your fingers out of the tube seems like the most natural and obvious solution, but it doesn’t work. The harder you try to pull your fingers out of the tube, the more they will get stuck.
The wisdom of the game is to understand that the obvious solutions to any problem are often wrong and even exacerbate it, and the solution to take your fingers out of the tube is to push them in and not pull out. This solution is not self-evident but a viable one.
Denying or avoiding emotional distress may seem like the most logical and natural way to get rid of it. However, you must have experienced negative feelings and thoughts and tried to get rid of them by ignoring them, showing yourself that what you do doesn’t work.
Benefits from learning to accept
Welcoming emotions instead of pushing them away is the key to reducing the discomfort of unpleasant experiences. Acceptance is the exact opposite of avoiding. When you learn to practice an attitude of acceptance to all experiences of daily life, including painful ones, you free yourself from suffering.
It may be hard to believe that acceptance of painful experiences reduces negative emotions. The reason is explained by the psychologist Carl Jung when he says, “People would do anything, no matter how absurd it is, to avoid looking at their souls.”
Mindfulness acceptance
Accepting mindfulness is to maintain through its practice an active, fully aware, and soft attitude towards your mind, body, and experiences. It simply requires you to notice what you think and feel and come to terms with it without refusing, no matter whether you like it or not.
Mindfulness acceptance is the actual application of self-compassion through which you gently and flexibly deal with painful emotions rather than making judgments. When you practice mindfulness acceptance, you stop operating from a judgmental mindset, thus avoiding being the victim of your fears, feelings of guilt, or anger.
This method is practiced as an application of meditation that aims to focus attention even more than the practice of mindfulness meditation, and in this practice, attention is drawn in a specific way so that all experiences are contained without room for rejection and, therefore, flexible and conscious acceptance eliminate negative feelings.
Two techniques that help you accept your emotions
1. Treat negative emotions as a friend
When you find that you are facing negative emotions, try the next steps: imagine that these feelings are your dear friend, and invite them to dinner with you at home. At the dinner table, there is a place for each one of these feelings that you should greet with ovation or it will come back and knock on the door again.
2. Focus on the feelings associated with this emotion
Now that the emotion has found its space, focus on the feelings associated with this emotion, be it fear, anger, etc. They are just labels that people use to describe a range of feelings that we experience.
Therefore, a very important step in healing your emotions in their purest form is physical sensations. Start exploring these sensations with an open and inquisitive mind.
Find out where it leaves its effect on your body and what characteristics these feelings have, and take a conscious attitude without judgments. Whatever happens, resist your desire to judge how you feel because judgments and rejections are incompatible with the practice of acceptance.
No emotion is bad; they are only bodily sensations
If you have judgmental thoughts, allow them to surface in your mind and let them go. Fighting these thoughts would only amplify them, so just notice and record them. Keep observing your internal experience in a fixable way for a few minutes.
At some point, you may notice a sense of lightness, like floating on water. This is a sign that the emotion has started to fade. So, keep awareness of the present moment and your breath. By practicing this technique, you will find no unacceptable emotion, even if the practice takes some time.
Dealing with our negative feelings consciously without making judgments and accepting them changes the negative nature of these feelings, something people have rarely experienced due to their tendency to avoid or reject unpleasant emotional states.
A new perspective in the vision of emotions
When you learn to embrace uncomfortable emotions, you realize that they are not terrifying or dangerous. Rather, it’s often how you deal with them or your judgments of them that make them seem so. However, if you change your perspective of seeing emotions, you can deal with them differently by accepting rather than rejecting them.
As we said at the beginning of the article, this practice may seem illogical because rejecting or ignoring negative feelings is the obvious procedure for dealing with them. For example, when you are gripped by fear, you feel resentful and associate disturbing emotions with negative events you seek to avoid or forget, but struggling against your own feelings exacerbates stress and suffering.
So, we said that in this fight, you will be a loser because you tend to respond intuitively to your emotions instead of choosing the right way to deal with them. When you accept your emotions, there is nothing left to struggle against, and then you’re free from pain, and you have new capabilities.
If all your focus is on getting rid of negative emotions, you will not be able to think about possible solutions, and if you accept your feelings, you will be free from psychological pain, and you will enhance your potential as well. As the Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl says: “When a situation can no longer be changed, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Conclusion
Emotions are inherently temporary, but they persist whenever you resist, reject, or ignore them. So, the next time you constantly experience a feeling or emotion, it has one meaning: It is time to learn to accept. So, welcome feelings without judgment, accept them and find how they disappear on their own.
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