Mindful Self Compassion--A personal Story - Part 5, By Laurie Hallihan
- laurie8033
- Feb 1
- 6 min read
Radical Acceptance sounded like an impossible ask years ago when I began mindfulness practice. I had an incredible amount of judgement for myself and others. I am certainly not perfect with the practice of radical acceptance, but I am now in a different realm of being with it.
Until 2012, I had a very unkind and highly dysfunctional inner and outer critic. This fueled the anxiety and suicidal depression I experienced for years. Back then, it felt like there was no way out. Although I meditated and was always searching for ways to help myself, truly nothing seemed to work. For many of us who enter the Mindfulness and Compassion space, the pain needs to become so large that we cannot bear it any longer. Change must happen. This is how it happened for me.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, it was fairly quick that my doctor recommended the mindful self compassion course. This was the beginning of cultivating radical acceptance. It did not come quickly. Notice the word CULTIVATION. Understanding what this really meant took a while as well. My mind wanted radical acceptance to happen immediately, but that is not how it happened for me. I feel like most people know that whatever we practice, we become good at. I was a master of dysfunctional coping because I had practiced it for so long. Most of us have trained our minds into the habitual reactive way of thinking. It takes time and patience to retrain the mind.
What exactly is radical acceptance? Radical acceptance involves completely accepting reality. It means we clearly see the facts of a situation, but so without judgment, resistance, or approval. This mind state must also be cultivated. By engaging with difficulty in this way, the mind does not perpetuate the suffering we are feeling into higher levels of suffering through the story we tell ourselves. In mindfulness, we call the extra layer of suffering the "second arrow". We are already suffering...we do not need to more suffering on ourselves.
Radical Acceptance components
It Is Not Approval: Accepting reality does not mean you like, approve of, or condone the situation.
It Stops additional Suffering: Pain is a part of life, but additional suffering is optional and often stems from fighting reality and the proliferation of unhelpful thoughts.
It helps keep your energy from depleting: By accepting what cannot be changed, you free up energy to address what can be changed.
It Involves your whole being: True acceptance requires you to feel it fully in your mind, heart, and body.
Helpful practices and meditations cultivate Radical Acceptance
Practice Mindfulness: Allow difficult emotions to exist without trying to suppress or escape them.
Self-Compassion: Use soothing techniques to cope with the discomfort of acceptance.
Notice the Struggle: Know when you are fighting reality, using phrases like "why me?" or "this shouldn't be". Employ the understanding of common humanity. Common humanity means that everyone on this earth suffers in some way. You are not alone.
Acknowledge the Facts: Explicitly state the facts of the situation, even if they are painful.
Use Your Body: Engage where you feel the pain, including mental pain within the body (See the body scan meditation for a body practice to begin engagement with the body in a healthy way.
Mind Habits: Make a conscious, repeated decision to accept the situation, especially when resistance arises.
Safety: Make sure to care for yourself if you become overwhelmed while you are practicing. Have a list of healthy things that bring you to safety. Perhaps taking a walk in nature, engaging with a being that makes you smile, a cup of tea, a bath...there are many ways to care for yourself. Explore different ideas and see what works for you!
Everyone is different and I invite you to find your own way, but I am going to outline some practices that helped me:
The RAIN meditation. I did the RAIN meditation every single day for at least a year. It was a giant part of the cultivation of compassion and radical acceptance. Once I began to accept myself, it began to extend naturally to others as well.
RAIN is an acronym for a beautiful mindfulness and compassion practice. It is important you feel internally resourced when you first begin this meditation. If at any point, you become overwhelmed, please make sure to release the whole meditation and move yourself to safety. This is a practice of self-compassion and radical acceptance of what is happening in that moment. In mindfulness, we never want to white knuckle our way through any experience.
The R is for recognizing what primary emotion we are feeling.
The A is for allowing this emotion to be present. Perhaps even internally verbalizing that you are making an agreement with yourself to be the emotion for just a few minutes.
The I is for investigation. Begin investigating with a beginners mind. Seeing if you can engage in a curious and open way. Like a child or a baby animal engages with the world. Everything is new and the investigation of emotion is really no different. Investigating what the emotion really feels like. Where does the emotion live in the body? How activating is the emotion? Does the emotion move? Does it bring up judgement? Be very aware of how activated you are a this point. Remember the instruction to release the meditation if needed.
The N is for nurturing this emotion. Can you begin to hold ANY part of the emotion with kindness? Sometimes I will picture myself actually holding the emotion and difficulty body parts with love. Letting love and kindness flow through me into these areas. You can picture breathing love and kindness into these parts. Perhaps picture a person that embodies compassion and love to you and use that feeling about this being to turn it inward. You can even send this part word of kindness. Something like: May I BEGIN to hold this difficulty with compassion or may I hold this emotion with compassion. Whatever type of phrase you choose, make sure it is as authentic as you can make it. That is why adding the word "begin" can be helpful. You can even say: may I , at some point in the distant future meet these emotions with compassion. Experiment with this part. The most important thing is that we START to cultivate kindness and compassion.
After this meditation, you may want to sit for a few minutes and allow yourself to see what happened within your experience. How did it change or not change? Be honest and be your true self. Allow yourself to sit and accept exactly how you are feeling in that moment.
Link to Laurie's RAIN meditation:
The Body Scan: This is another meditation I did almost daily for years. Our bodies hold experience. This is something science has been showing more and more in the last several years. If we do not deal with our emotions, they will typically go somewhere in the body and can create more pain and illness. The body scan is a wonderful way to cultivate radical acceptance within the context of the body. It also can give us a much clearer sense of what is truly happening within us. This usually will also lead to more acceptance of the emotions and for me it eventually helped lead me to radical acceptance and love of my body and whole being. Again, this did not happen right away. This has been a 13 year cultivation. Pema Chodron says “meditation gives us the opportunity to have an open, compassionate attentiveness to whatever is going on.
Link to Laurie's Body Scan Meditation--shorter and longer and compassion based:
https://www.mindingthewaves.com/general-8-3 - Short Body Scan
https://www.mindingthewaves.com/45minutebodyscan - Longer Body Scan
https://www.mindingthewaves.com/compassionatebodyscan - Compassionate Body Scan
The Self Compassion Break: This beautiful practice is a part of the Mindful Self-Compassion program and can add a layer of deeper self compassion cultivation in addition to radical acceptance. This is another practice I have continued to this day. It can provide a quick and efficient self-compassion practice that can be applied whenever you find yourself in a difficult situation. This practice offers a felt-sense of the three components of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness.” This meditation begins to train our minds to see what is happening. It reminds us that ALL beings have difficult emotions. Lastly, it asks us to give ourselves the gift of self-kindness.
Link to Laurie's Self-Compassion break meditation:
Important reminder: These practices helped me immensely to work through debilitating mind states that had grown over the years into nearly non-functioning mind and body states. I did not realize it at the time, but there was complex PTSD happening also. I have spent years. not only doing these practices, but also going to a therapist that specialized in mindfulness and also seeing an EMDR complex PTSD specialist. There are many therapists and mindfulness practitioners who work on a sliding scale and many, myself included, offer courses/therapy at low or no cost. Please investigate your options. It can take time and patience, but the result has been beautiful.
The courses, workshops and blogs offered through Minding the Waves are not a substitute for professional mental health care or crisis intervention. If you or someone you know is in crisis, we encourage you to reach out to local mental health support resources. In the U.S., call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. In Canada, call or text Talk Suicide Canada at 1-833-456-4566. Internationally you can find the correct resource for your area here.
Help is available, and you are not alone.
View more of my blog: https://www.mindingthewaves.com/blog
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