Radical Acceptance ~ Slow Read Week Three

This week we read Chapter 3 - The Sacred Pause: Resting Under the Bodhi Tree.

SYNOPSIS:

This week we explore how taking a pause can slow down our reactions and connect us with a presence and our emotions and physical sensations. Tara Brach starts off with a metaphor from Air Force pilots, illustrating how they learned to take their hands off the controls. Then she takes us through work with a client who was reactive in her relationships, based upon old wounds and beliefs about herself.

“In our lives we often find ourselves in situations we can’t control, circumstances in which none of our strategies work. Helpless and distraught, we frantically try to manage what is happening.”

It is counterintuitive to pause and release control in a threatening situation. The natural response is to grip harder in order to control. We may even feel frantic in our attempts to solve a problem.

Brach offers us the sacred pause - learning to stop in a moment, breathe, and notice our thoughts and feelings. She encourages us to not rush through the pause, but to become aware of what is filling our internal experience.

“We head into emotionally charged confrontations nervously rehearsing and strategizing. The more we fear failure the more frenetically our bodies and minds work. We fill our days with continual moment: mental planning and worrying, habitual talking, fixing, scratching, adjusting, phoning, snacking, discarding, buying, looking in the mirror.”

Brach’s description of the emotionally charged situation is quite common in anxiety. We over-analyze, over-think, ruminate, and worry in an attempt to solve a problem and to make ourselves feel better. However these attempts only reinforce the anxiety and rarely offer a solution.

Some characteristics of the pause:

• It is the first step in Radical Acceptance.
• In a moment, we suspend activity nor do we work towards a goal.
• A pause can be any length of time, ranging from a minute to a season.
• It can incorporate a guided meditation, a walk, or any gentle activity.
• The pause can feel uncomfortable - we will want to take action or stay distracted.
• When we return to activity after the pause, we bring the awareness with us.

“Through the sacred act of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience.”

Just as we learn in meditation to observe our thoughts, how it is the observation of our thoughts that allows us to choose how to respond, the same is true for the pause. The pause allows gives us time to choose our reaction, our behavior, rather than being led by internal triggers or unconscious forces.

Brach illustrates through Laura’s example that the pause allows us to feel our emotions and become aware of their sources. Over time, our tolerance to feel our emotions (emotional regulation) increases with repeated practice, and we don’t have to run away or distract from distressing emotions.

“When we learn to face and feel the fear and shame we habitually avoid, we begin to awaken from trance.”

Brach talks about the shadow self, the part of us that has been wounded and believes negative messages about ourselves. She discusses how it is often from the shadow self that we are responding in a moment to a situation that feels anxiety-provoking or threatening.

It can be difficult to gain perspective if we remain busy, consumed with activity and distracted from our feelings (and running from our shadows). While humans generally don’t want to feel pain and we’ll do anything to avoid it, this avoidance can actually increase the distress and be the cause of our suffering.

The pause ushers us into mindfulness, emotional regulation, and tolerance of distress.

“We learn Radical Acceptance by practicing pausing again and again. At the very moment when we’re about to lash out in verbal outrage, we don’t. When we feel anxious, instead of turning on the TV or making a phone call or mentally obsessing, we sit still and feel our discomfort or restlessness. In this pause we let go of thinking and doing, and we become intimate with what is happening in our body, heart, and mind.”

REFLECTIONS:

How hindsight changes perspective. In hindsight, I can see the times that I should have taken my hands off a situation and allowed for space to think, breathe, and decide. Instead I felt frantic in my anxiety, replaying negative outcomes, fearful of repercussions, and making decisions out of terror. The metaphor of the air force pilots reminds us to slow down and let go in the moments we want to grab hold harder.

It makes me think - when we are anxious about a scenario - what would happen if we relinquished control? What if we paused and allowed for a change of perspective or to simply thinking clearer without the cloud of anxiety that distorts?

Shadow self. When I worked as a prison psychologist, my shadow self was running my days. Instead of being a kind, compassionate therapist, my anger was trigger thin. I frequently came home in a rage and any small offense by my husband unleashed all my frustrations. Working in the oppressive environment, I felt deeply insecure, out of my depth, and constantly in fear of being attacked (whether verbally or physically).

“Any of us, when our particular place of insecurity or woundedness is touched, easily regress into the fullness of trance.”

The prison was my personal trigger - no matter how many offenders I saw in a day (sometimes 90), it was never enough. The people in charge always wanted more from me (and the other clinicians). This was a familiar pattern when I worked in primary care also - we were expected to see a minimum of 20 patients in an 8 hour day. Nothing I did was ever good enough. There was never a pat on the back or “good job” uttered. I was living from my shadow self, and my reactions showed it.

Ultimately I chose to work in environments where I didn’t have this type of external pressure, but I wonder how taking a pause could have served me in those situations.

Emotion regulation.  Brach is giving us a crash course into the beginnings of emotion regulation: allowing ourselves to feel pain and the breadth of our emotions without relying on distractions to avoid how we feel.  Many of us, unless we had emotionally mature and insightful parents, have a limited skillset on regulating our emotions. Instead it seems like humanity runs from pain and only wants pleasure.

Emotion regulation is a skill that allows us to feel what we feel without trying to pull away, run, or hide. We feel what is there with the knowledge that our feelings are temporary, that they will change if we give them enough time, and that while we may not be comfortable, we can tolerate the discomfort. It means using skills to regulate the emotion - to know when and how to act given a specific feeling.

The first step to emotion regulation is building a repertoire of feeling words: being able to clearly state what we are feeling in a moment, and to correctly and accurately name how we feel. Many people grow up with up alexithymia - the inability to name one’s emotional experience. Often starting the day with an emotional “check in “How am I feeling in this moment?” And ending the day with another check in. As we do this more frequently, it becomes second nature and we can more easily identify our internal experience.

JOURNALING:

This week’s exercise is to pause during your day. Set an alarm to help you remember, maybe once a day to begin. Try it for several days and see what you notice as you take a pause, breathe deep ,and get in touch with your body and internal feelings.

You might journal what the experience was like:

1. When did you do it?
2. What activity did you interrupt? Were you working, talking with your spouse, worrying?
3. What did you notice in your body? What physical sensations?
4. What emotions did you notice? Try naming them.
5. How did the pause feel?
6. Did it make you want to try again or was it too unpleasant that you resist doing it again?

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NEXT WEEK:

There is no reading for next week. Take a moment to pause, catch up with the reading, and rest. See you the following week!

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