Developing a nonjudgmental attitude

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“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way;

On purpose,
in the present moment, and
nonjudgmentally.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Kabat-Zinn’s definition highlights that an important aspect of mindfulness is acceptance, or of avoiding harsh judgments. Acceptance means being able to be aware of our experience without either clinging to it or pushing it away. Instead we accept our experience with equanimity.

All too often we find it difficult to accept what we’re feeling. A common pattern is to experience some initial unpleasant experience, and then to feel bad because of feeling bad, and then to feel bad about feeling bad about feeling bad, and so on. It’s a vicious cycle of feeling bad about feeling bad. The feelings are generated by thinking in unhelpful ways, so this means there are several approaches to breaking the vicious cycle.

Acceptance of what you’re feeling is one tool, although it’s not so much a tool as a way of being. Acceptance means acknowledging what you’re feeling, and standing back from it so that although you experience the unpleasant emotion you don’t entirely define yourself by it.

An important approach in doing this is to locate the feeling in the body.

• What shape is the feeling?
• Where exactly is it located?
• What color - if any - is it?
• What kind of texture does it have?
• Does it change over time?

In locating the emotion in the body in this way, we realize that the emotion is smaller than we are. We’re bigger than any emotion that we experience, which means that if we stand back from the emotion then not everything we’re experiencing is colored by the emotion. In this way we create a sort of “space” between ourselves and the emotion so that we’re not so caught up in it.

This approach also allows us to surround difficult emotions with lovingkindness.

Comments

Comment from Trish
Time: August 30, 2007, 1:22 pm

Isn’t it nice how a few words such as your article, make such good sense and have helped me on the road to freeing myself.

thank you

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