Key Attitudes to Mindful Healing: Acceptance

This video by Jon Kabat-Zinn is basic to understanding one of the 9 attitudes of mindfulness: Acceptance

Acceptance is not passive resignation. Acceptance is an active recognition that things are the way they are. This has key relevance to individuals struggling with chronic pain, trauma, loss, and stress in our relationships – all of which we wish were not happening or had not happened. In a way, during critical events in our lives, we undergo a process of change into different people: our mind thinks differently, our hearts feel in a way we don’t recognize, and our behaviour is unrecognizable or “crazy” to ourselves and to others around us. In essence, we have grown, exponentially in a very short period of time. This process of change can also occur during ordinary development, such as the changes during infancy from babbling to speech within our first year after birth or the longer and confusing changes in physical and sexual development during the teen years. To accept these changes in ourselves and others is key to psychological and emotional understanding and healing.