Mindfulness is not about accepting yourself exactly as you are

There’s a concern many people have around something that might happen to them when they start practicing mindfulness.

It’s not that they may never again take off their baggy pants, that their house might start smelling like a Buddhist temple, or that they’ll spend half their income on retreats and tiny little Buddha statues.

Although that could definitely happen.

What I’m talking about is more to do with how it might fundamentally change you as a person and consequently how you function in life.

The concern is that after a few weeks or months of practicing mindfulness, when you eventually start chilling out and feeling okay with the not so pleasant aspects of yourself and life, you might also start smoothing out your edges, loosing your quirky idiosyncrasies, and dropping all the other stuff that makes you you — particularly what fuels you to be successful and basically get anything done.

Sure, you’ll be much easier to be around and will barely flinch when the wifi doesn’t work or someone cuts you off in traffic. But you’ll also be somewhat dull, indifferent, and passive, not minding that your inbox and to-do list are overflowing and even preferring to skip work to spend your days prancing around the back garden catching butterflies whilst the dishes pile up and the bills keep coming in.

Let’s be honest, it’s a valid concern.

I mean, after practicing and studying mindfulness for a few years now, I can see it happening to myself and those around me. I wasn’t super industrious to begin with, but now more than ever I’m okay with missing deadlines and avoiding important stuff in favor of browsing Etsy for little spiritual trinkets for my puja table and staring at birds out the window. I’m better able to cope with stress and less easy to offend, but at the same time, I can also be subdued, less likely to speak out on what I care about, and reluctant to cause disruption or take risks.

But here’s the thing: Isn’t this what mindfulness is all about?

Not browsing Etsy for little Buddhas. But becoming so chill and accepting of yourself and life that you realize there’s nothing really that you need to do and nowhere really to go.

Because everything is perfect exactly as it is. You are perfect exactly as you are.

There’s a hidden danger that comes with taking such seemingly obvious and straight forward statements on face value.

Whereas on the surface, they can mean one thing and lead to a corresponding set of behaviors and attitudes, on closer inspection, they can mean something entirely different.

Mindfulness is a practice — it is experiential and therefore not just something you can understand intellectually. The result is many mindfulness teachings like acceptance can be taken on the level of the thinking mind, and solely the thinking mind, as if they were maths equations to solve or religious dogma to follow. This approach can take you some of the way, but relying on intellect alone can also lead to some unintended consequences.

For one, as you can see, an accepting attitude toward yourself and life on the whole can be translated as a way of giving in to your bad habits and passively surrendering to whatever circumstances float your way. A kind of stepping back from participating and acting in the world to a stance of inactivity and living with as little stuff and fuss as possible.

But, and here’s the thing, acceptance is not exclusive of taking action, causing disruption, and being a force of will—even a menace—in the world. Often that’s exactly what’s needed, particularly when you’re facing what seems like major setbacks or you live in our complex, modern society. Some of the most accepting people in the world—Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi—are also some of the most prolific, disruptive, tenacious, and revolutionary.

So, if acceptance, as taught in mindfulness practice, is not about accepting things exactly as they are, then what the heck is it about? And, crucially, why are dumbasses like me going so wrong?

Let’s get a few things straight and dive into what I’m calling the three rules of acceptance.

Rule 1: Acceptance is not about wanting things to be how they are, it’s about not rejecting how they are

So says there’s some flaw, insecurity, or otherwise unwanted part of yourself or your life you’d like to finally be cool with and move on from. It could be that you’re terrible at maths, that you have a third nipple, or that your country is run by an idiot.

Fortunately, you come across a magical practice called acceptance which promises that you can be okay with it and even come to love it.

All you have to do is take your president or third nipple, give up trying to fight or change them, and instead, accept them exactly how they are.

To give a few more serious examples, it could be stopping fighting reality and accepting that you’ll never get back with your ex. It could be letting go of trying to make yourself into a people person when you’re clearly an introvert. Or it could be giving up berating yourself for being forty-nine and still living in your mom’s basement.

Whatever it is, acceptance can be used as a way of taking it easy on yourself, toning down the constant self-flagellation, and putting an end to wasting your life chasing after dreams or living in fantasies out of fear of facing the truth. So, ultimately, you can get on with making the most of your life and move on.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach. The problem is, it can easily turn into a way of passively giving in or resigning yourself to something you don’t want or actually wish you could change. A sort of reluctant surrendering to the cold hard facts of life — not because you do actually accept them, but because that’s how they are and there’s no use trying to deny or change them.

This isn’t acceptance. This is the watered-down “it is how it is”, “that’s life”, “go with the flow”, “what can you do”, version of acceptance.

Your partner arrives late for dinner, again. Annoying, but you accept it cos you don’t want an argument, and anyway, that’s just what he’s like.

You unfairly missed out on that promotion or project. But you take it on the chin because you accept your boss is a douche, and anyway, there’s always next time.

You live in your mom’s basement and eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But you accept your urges because you know you’re not perfect, and anyway, you accept you’re just a freak with a third nipple.

This version of acceptance is pretty common in the mindfulness world, to the point many associate mindfulness with complacency, passivity, and inaction.

Bur rather than being what acceptance is all about, this superficial version is a way of trying to use acceptance as another—albeit more subtle and unwitting—way to change things.

When used in this way, often the best you can muster is a sort of “thanks, but no thanks.” A kind of unwilling waving of the white flag while saying, “Ohhhh fine, shit happens. I guess I’ll live with it….. If I have to.”

It’s a bit like signing for a parcel from Amazon you’ve already decided you don’t want it, taking it in anyway, and just plonking the unwanted thing in your hall to get in the way and gather dust.

So what’s going on here?

This version of acceptance is built on the misunderstanding that acceptance is about having to want, like, or feel good about something being a certain way to accept it. In other words, it typically revolves around avoiding pain or conflict and feeling good.

Acceptance has nothing to do with wanting things to be a certain way of feeling good about them: it’s about opening up to how they are, without needing to pretend or imagine them to be different.

This is a subtle difference that involves the often uncomfortable opening up to the fact that you may actually really don’t want things to be how they are. After all, you’re trying to accept it for a reason. And so chances are it is something that feels really shitty, something that you don’t condone one bit, and something that more than anything you wish wasn’t the way it was.

As long as you are resisting how things are, they can’t be different. And so when you do this and learn to accept things exactly as they are, not because you want them to be so and “accept” they will always be that way, but just because that’s how they are, paradoxically, you allow them to change.

What this looks like is you start to realize it’s possible to feel okay with not feeling okay, that you can be at ease with feeling unease, and that something you don’t like or don’t want can happen to you without it being the end of the world or consuming your whole identity.

This can sound like an impossibility for some. The fact our default mode is often one of rejecting how things are because we are so fixated on trying to get what we want.

Thus, to go beyond this mode, we also need to also be able to shift from trying to change our experience, by trying to get rid of the things we don’t want and make something feel good that doesn’t feel good, to changing our relationship to our experience.

Rule 2: Acceptance is not about changing your experience, it’s about changing your relationship to it

The typical approach to doing pretty much anything in the West is to use strength and/or intelligence. Especially when it comes to self-improvement.

You train, learn, develop, and acquire more and more knowledge and skills so you can become a better person and ultimately the best version of you you can be.

It’s no surprise, then, that this attitude is also brought to even something that’s about the opposite: accepting things just as they are.

If only you can fully understand something, meditate enough, or otherwise improve yourself so that you are adequately compassionate or enlightened, then maybe, just maybe, you can learn to be okay with your imperfect partner or accepting of your loathed third nipple or whatever the heck it may be.

Doing all this self-improvement can certainly help toward accepting something. But it rarely solves the problem and can often make things worse.

What this comes down to is the difference between trying to change the contents of your experience, in contrast to changing your relationship to your experience.

This might not make much sense. The fact is, we spend so much of our lives going about trying to change and manipulate stuff, from our state of mind and our bodies to our circumstances and our bank balances, that we often can’t see that there’s another way to be.

This mode of mind is one of problem-solving, and it is the only way things would ever get done in the outside world. But when this problem-solving mode is brought to our internal world and our inner experience, it can wreak havoc: causing us to see difficult but natural sensations and emotions like fear, grief, and doubt as problems to solve, threats to get rid of, and defects to fix.

Of course, difficult emotions, unwanted sensations, and negative thoughts are not problems to solve or threats to get rid of. They’re not even problems in that they can be solved by finding the right piece of knowledge that has the answer. They’re fleeting events and experiences that are an inherent part of human experience. As such, instead of getting involved in trying to deny or change them and reinforcing their hold over you, the trick is to know when they’re arising and being able to step back from the fight.

You only see your internal experience as a problem when for some reason or other you’re trying to avoid or get away from it. And so you can often recognize when you’re stuck in problem-solving mode because there’s also a sense of striving, whether it’s in ruminating and using thoughts to try and fix something, or in trying to avoid or push away something by recklessly and blindly consuming box sets and liter tubs of double choc ice cream.

It is this sense of discomfort and striving that we’re trying to recognize in changing our relationship to experience. Mindfulness practice and acceptance is about seeing a new way of being with our experience that doesn’t involve needing to do anything to fix or get away from whatever is here. Instead, it’s about just letting yourself be here and feel whatever it is you are feeling — without having to like, dislike, deny, judge, push away, control, or change it in any way.

Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? But you’ll be surprised how just being with your experience and feeling what you’re feeling, as opposed to suppressing or being compelled to act on your thoughts or emotions, is an incredibly subtle art and something few people ever learn to do.

One pitfall is that people get good at noticing their experience, but then get caught up in judging it and, say, feeling guilty for having so many negative thoughts. This is where it is key to make the distinction that, in acceptance, there’s no room for judgment, self-criticism, guilt, or any other reaction to your experience.

As well as accepting an experience, by fully accepting something you are also accepting your reaction to the experience—without pushing it away or sticking your nose up at it.

With two rules down, there’s one final misunderstanding of acceptance that’s key to understanding it and that makes the third rule on our list.

Rule 3: Acceptance is not about reaching a new special state, it’s about being aware of non-acceptance

So why do we find it so tricky to make the shift from trying to change what we’re experiencing to changing our relationship to it?

Even when we give up the fight and stop treating ourselves as a problem to solve, it can still feel like acceptance is still a far off reality that always just seems to escape us.

The fact is, we’re so wired to look outside ourselves for answers that it’s not as simple as learning a bit about acceptance and then wham, you love yourself and everything is just sunshine and rainbows.

Instead, what often happens is that acceptance becomes another goal to achieve, another special state to find, and another thing you have to learn to do before you can, ironically, accept things just as they are.

This misunderstanding is based on the fundamental and misguided idea that what we need to feel whole and satisfied is somewhere outside of us. It’s in that new car or house, that better job, or soul mate you’re yet to meet. All you have to do is hunt them down and find them, or find the right combination, and you will finally feel complete.

It’s not that all this stuff isn’t nice and all. But you shouldn’t have to have a house with a steam room and two-holiday homes to feel complete or just be at ease with yourself. But more to the point, anything that’s outside of you can never make you feel whole or completely at ease with yourself.

Why? For one, it’s outside of yourself, so it’s inherently unstable and unreliable. Two, you are not a great judge of what you want or need, as it’s often based on whim, mood, chance, and how much chocolate you’ve eaten.

But three and most of all, in order to be fulfilled by something you haven’t already got — whether it be a special state of mind, an esoteric piece of knowledge, or a luxury million-pound yacht — then by definition, you have to be lacking in something, broken, or somehow incomplete to begin with.

This is the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths in a nutshell. He realized that we’re born seeking for things like perfection and happiness outside of ourselves. He also realized that is it this seeking, this craving and desire to change ourselves and get other than where we are — not how things are themselves — that is the source of our sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.

In other words, we often feel like we are lacking something because we are seeking fulfillment. We often can’t accept something about ourselves or our lives because we are striving so much to find acceptance.

Not the other way around.

This is also the backwards law talked about Alan Watts and artfully described by Mark Manson. It goes something like the more you chase after something, the more it gets away from you and contributes to the opposite effect of what you wanted to happen.

For example:

The more you try and accept something about yourself and move on, the more you can reinforce it and the more stuck or complacent you can become.

Thankfully, it’s called the backwards law because it also works the other way around:

The more you accept your lack of acceptance, including your desire for things not to be how they are, the more you’re able to let go of something and move on.

When you desire something like acceptance, your mind is simultaneously the thing that is desiring and the target of its own desires. As Mark describes, it’s like a dog going from chasing little creatures to chasing its own tail, “The more she chases, the more her tail seems to run away. That’s because the dog lacks the perspective to realize that she and the tail are the exact same thing.”

So it isn’t just enough to stop chasing your own tail by, say, forcing your mind to relax and giving up chasing acceptance. You also have to realize that you and you and your tail are one and the same.

You can try do this by chasing it around and around until you grab it and fall over. Or by just standing there and staring blankly with your tongue hanging out.

But this isn’t likely to work.

Acceptance is about neither being actively seeking or passively giving up. Both can merely serve to direct the mind further away from itself.

Acceptance is about resting into what’s already here. Not in a way that implies weakness or trying to avoid action; but in relinquishing the need to always judge, change, and control your experience. In a few words, by being increasingly aware of non-acceptance.

It’s about allowing and opening up to whatever unwanted thought or uncomfortable feeling so that it can arise and pass, without it having to mean or say anything fundamental about who you are.

When you turn towards our experience like this, it can free up tonnes of energy that was lost in the constant resistance to your experience and feelings of guilt, worry, or denial. Consequently, it can spur a whole boatload of deliberate and disruptive action and change — whether that be getting out of your mom’s basement and going back to uni or cutting down on doing stuff and going on a month-long silent retreat.

Change and acceptance are inseparable. Not because you need to take action because your sense of fundamental okayness or wholeness depends on it, but because you’re no longer limiting yourself and your experience to anyone set of feelings or only what you think you want. You do it because you have gone beyond a limited view of yourself and the world and realize the sentiment behind Shunryu Suzuki’s famous words, “Each of you is perfect the way you are … and you can use a little improvement.”

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