personal growth

How to accept your day as it is

Christine Joseph

life coach, organizing expert, and mindfulness teacher

How might your day be different if you accepted everything in and about it – the good, the bad, and the ugly?
(Note that I didn’t write like or resign yourself to your day, I wrote accept.)
For me, that means accepting – rather than internally resisting – another day of virtual learning for three young boys, including their perennial call for food, the seemingly endless need to remind that school is happening right now, and the likely tears involved. (Oh, and then there’s the mental gymnastics of fitting my career into the narrow gaps.) It also means living with yet more uncertainty about the future, craving a day more “normal,” and even grieving time lost with family and friends that will never be found.
Lately I’ve been working on loosening my grip on how I want things to be and accepting them as they are. And there’s plenty of material for practice. Accepting circumstances beyond my control – and the feelings involved – means less resistance to reality and less energy devoted to fruitlessly wishing things were different.
The truth is that much about our day just is. And when conditions in our day are beyond our control, one option for responding is radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance is saying yes to life as it is. It’s an act of self-compassion – accepting, even welcoming, our internal experience so that we can respond more wisely to our external circumstances. It’s not being helpless or resigned. Rather, it’s a deliberate action of registering difficult feelings before choosing how to respond to them. Ultimately, it’s a means of creating freedom from the tethers of our own resistance and expanding possibilities of how to move forward.
Here’s how to give radical acceptance a try.
Take a moment. Experience what is there.
To practice radical acceptance, we first have to notice that we’re resisting things as they are. Clues may be anger starting to boil over, tightness in the body, or thoughts that things “should” be different. When you detect a clue, take a moment from normal mental busyness and simply notice your thoughts or tension in your body. Ask yourself: “What wants my attention right now?”
Witness your experience by naming it.
On autopilot, our minds tend to evaluate what’s happening around us. It’s wrong, it’s bad, I’m [enter judgment here]… When practicing radical acceptance, we bring the spirit of unconditional friendliness that we would bring to a friend. In this spirit, we can recognize the existence of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations by simply noting them. Noting our experience makes room for the truth of its presence without becoming entangled in our stories or evaluations. After noticing a hint of resistance in yourself and pausing, try noting your experience. Simply name what you notice as it occurs. For example: “judging, judging, anger, anger, tight, disappointment…”
Say yes.
We can bring a welcoming attitude to our experience by saying yes to it. We can say yes to thoughts, feelings, or sensations that enter our awareness – and ultimately to life itself. Saying yes does not mean approving or resigning ourselves to thoughts or impulses. Tara Brach (author of the book Radical Acceptance) writes: “Yes is an inner practice of acceptance in which we willingly allow our thoughts and feelings to naturally arise and pass away.” In relating to our thoughts and feelings with friendliness rather than resistance, then letting them go, their power diminishes. Try softly (or even silently) whispering yes to anything you note. You can also say yes beyond your immediate experience. Yes to friendships, yes to choices you’ve made, yes to your personality, yes to our whole self. Notice how welcoming your experience influences your internal state.
Practice.
Radical acceptance requires practice. And life presents opportunities in spades. So, why not give it a try? Start with bringing nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance to ordinary, everyday activities. Paying attention will reveal ample opportunity. Say yes to traffic, a gloomy day, frustration over a meal gone awry. Then pay attention to what happens to you.

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