Posts tagged with "acceptance"
Full Catastrophe Change
For over 20 years Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn has been working with sufferers of pain, anxiety and stress using ‘mindfulness’ meditation at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. He defines mindfulness elegantly as, ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.’
I was reading his classic text ‘Full Catastrophe Living’ when I discovered something that I felt resonated strongly with the approach we use in facilitating the Natural Change Project.
- ‘We are putting [patients] in a paradoxical situation. They have come to the clinic hopeful of having something positive happen, yet they are instructed to practice without trying to get anywhere. Instead, we encourage them to try to be fully where they already are, with acceptance. In addition, we suggest they suspend judgement for the eight weeks they are in the [mindfulness] course and decide only at the end whether it was worthwhile.’
- ‘Why do we take this approach? Creating this paradoxical situation invites people to explore non-striving and self-acceptance as ways of being. It gives them permission to start from scratch, to tap a new way of seeing and feeling without holding up standards of success and failure based on a habitual and limited way of seeing their problems and their expectations about what they should be feeling. We practice the meditation in this way because the effort to try to “get somewhere” is so often the wrong kind of effort for catalysing change or growth or healing, coming as it usually does from a rejection of present-moment reality without having a full awareness and understanding of that reality’. (p.90)
