How To....Radical Acceptance

So the last post was about Radical Acceptance - what it is and what it is not.
But how do we do it? That is the million dollar question.

There are 4 skills to help you with radically accepting the situation, as it is, in the current moment.

OBSERVING YOUR BREATH
This is a practice intended to help you tolerate the current moment. It is a way of taking hold of your mind and centreing yourself and gaining access to solving the problem or improving the moment.

Observing you breath serves 2 important purposes.

1. Focusing on your breathing assists with physiological relaxing. When nervous, many people hold their breath or breathe shallowly, which creates additional tension and increases carbon dioxide in the blood (triggering adrenalin bursts). By observing your breath, you release the effort to control it. When you stop controlling your breath, your body takes over and your breathing naturally becomes deeper and fuller and more relaxed.
2. The breath is used as a point of focus because it is always available and provides a basic connection to the present moment. This activity occupies your mind and there is less room for worrisome thoughts.

HALF-SMILING

This is the practice of accepting and tolerating reality with your body. It is the adoption of acceptance with one area of the body: our facial muscles (lips).

Facial expressions communicate with the brain which in turn, influences our emotions. Since emotions influence our facial muscles unconsciously, by consciously controlling our facial muscles, we acn affect our emotions or how we feel. (Research Based!!)

To do it, you relax your face, neck and shoulder muscles and then slightly up-turn your lips. Half-smile is best achieved with a relaxed face.

NOTE: Many people struggle with this skill as they feel it invalidates their feelings. Many will say they wore a "happy face" for years and that half smiling triggers them to feel like they are FAKING IT...As if everything is OK when it is NOT.

However, the reason individuals practice half smiling exercises is to help them tolerate and accept reality and reduce their suffering. It is about self-care and control, not to prove their 'happiness' to other people.

Half-Smiling is done for oneself.

TURNING THE MIND

Turning the mind from the topic causing it distress is to 'turn toward acceptance'; and is a choice because you have to CHOOSE to turn your mind. However, acceptance any only last a moment or 2 so people have to continuously turn their mind, over and over and over again. When we 'turn the mind' in a certain direction or away from a specific situation, change occurs. The goal is to decrease the intensity of an emotion and increase the feeling of power in make the choice.

Example: Quitting Smoking - When a person who smokes decides to stops smoking, they DO NOT make this decision once. The individual needs to make the decision over and over again. This is due to the fact that although the individual decided to quit smoking, they will inevitably experience the urge to smoke again, which makes sense. In order to avoid giving in to these urges, the individual needs to 'turn their mind' to their choice to not smoke and needs to do this over and over again. It will becomes easier. The person must also accept that they will have these thought and urges AND know that they have a choice as to whether to act on them or not.

WILLINGNESS VS WILLFULNESS

In order to 'turn the mind', individual need to be WILLING.

WILLINGNESS is accepting 'what is' and then responding in an effective way. It is doing what works in the current moment or situation.

WILLFULNESS is imposing one's will on reality - trying to fix everything or refusing to do what is needed. Willfulness is asking 'why?' vs accepting 'it happened and it is what it is'. Willfulness is the opposite of doing what works to move forward.

Willingness and willfulness do not apply to specific things or situation. they reflect instead the underlying attitude one has toward life.

Example: Life is like hitting baseballs from a pitching machine. A person's job is just to do their best to hit each ball as it comes. Refusing to accept that a ball is coming does not make it stop coming. Willpower  defiance, crying or whimpering does not make the machine stop pitching the balls; they keep coming over and over again. So...a person can CHOOSE to stand in the way of the ball and get hit, stand there doing nothing and let the ball go by as a strike, OR swing at the ball.