Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

by Steven C. Hayes

Shunryu Suzuki, a famous Zen teacher who lived in this country in the 1960s, often said, “The posture is the practice.” Traditionally, sitting practice of the type we are discussing is done seated on a pillow on the floor in the lotus position. While in the lotus position, your legs are crossed. That is, you take your right foot in your hands and place it on your left thigh. You rest that foot on top of your thigh at the crease between your hip and your left groin. Then you take your left foot and place it on top of your right thigh, at the crease between your hip and your right groin. Your spine should be straight, chin pointed slightly downward, while the crown of your head reaches toward the sky. Your arms form a loose circle with your hands also forming a circle of their own, resting one on top of the other, thumbs touching lightly together. Seated in this position there are three points of contact with the ground: your two knees and your bottom via the pillow.

When we say “acceptance” or “willingness” in this book we are not referring to accepting situations, events, or behaviors that are readily changeable.

EXERCISE: What Needs to Be Accepted

We just listed five domains of avoidance (memories and images; bodily sensations; emotions; thoughts; and behavioral predispositions and urges to respond), and we’ve asked about the costs in each of these domains.

The goal of willingness is flexibility.

Our minds cannot fully understand willingness, because willingness is nonjudgmental and exists in the present, while the way that minds work is based on temporal relations and evaluations.

Willingness Is Not Wanting

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! — Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks (1997)

Willingness Is Not Conditional

Willingness Is Not “Trying”

Willingness means abandoning that measurement. Suffering is no longer synonymous with the content of your pain. It is now synonymous with the postponement of living your life in the service of winning the struggle.

“how anxious or depressed are you?” are no longer relevant.

Willingness is: Holding your pain as you would hold a delicate flower in your hand

Willingness is not: Resisting your pain Ignoring your pain Forgetting your pain Buying your pain Doing what pain says Not doing what pain says Believing your pain Not believing your pain

starting small means limiting the time or context, not the setting on the Willingness dial. If you can’t get the dial set to a 10, it is not worth doing even for a second.

EXERCISE: The Tin-Can Monster

EXERCISE: Acceptance in Real-Time

difficult experiences. Open yourself to them by first putting yourself in the observer position, and then with your observer-self look at them with a defused, accepting, mindful posture.

Notice what thoughts come up for you. Notice them the way you would notice a cloud drift by. Do nothing to make them come or go. Do not argue with them. Do not disbelieve them or follow them where they go. Just notice them, as you might notice the sound of a radio in the background. Thank your mind for generating all its products for you.

Take this list with you and glance at it while doing your actual exposure. Notice your body and its sensations. Make room for them. Notice what is around you. Appreciate your immediate environment. Do not avoid. Notice your thoughts, but just let them come and go. Don’t follow them. Notice the pull to your past and future. Then notice you are here in the present. Don’t fight. Notice the pull to act and to avoid. Do nothing about that pull except to notice it. Do something new. Perhaps even be playful. Use your reverse compass (but only if you are willing!). Notice you are noticing all these things.

When you have accomplished that (it can take multiple exposures), move on to scenario number two and do the same thing.

values are verbs and adverbs, not nouns or adjectives; they are something you do or a quality of something you do, not something you have. If they are something you do (or a quality of something you do), they never end. You are never finished.

Choices and reasoned judgments are not the same thing. When you make a judgment, you apply your mind and its evaluative abilities to alternatives, and depending on what you want, you pick one of those alternatives.

Values are not judgments. Values are choices. Choices are selections between alternatives that may be made in the presence of reasons

noticing all of these mental events and simply picking one of the letters, with these reasons, but neither for nor against these reasons.

why depression sometimes follows getting a degree, getting married, or getting a promotion at work.

acceptance is that, in our pain, we are given some guidance toward our values. The reverse is also true: in our values, we find our pain.

We say, “The outcome is the process through which process becomes the outcome.” Your values are themselves the “outcome” you are looking for and you get to have that “outcome” now because those values empower the process of living now. Every step you take in the direction of those values is a part of that process.

If we use our values to beat ourselves up, we are buying into the thought that we can’t be about the values we actually have, merely because sometimes we wander.

Minds are like that. They will never change. They are evaluative, predictive, comparative, worrying “organs.” But in the case of values, it is different. Once you choose them, you are in fact choosing them. You’ve won. Then they allow you to follow your path and to measure your progress on that path.

The way to fill this gap is to choose to do things for no reason other than you said so. At one time in human history this was a common practice, and was considered a kind of moral training. It still exists in our spiritual and religious institutions, but

But even then you have the ability to respond (the response-ability).

In the acceptance and commitment cycle, the sequence is different. You notice the chatter all right, but you don’t become entangled in it. You see that there is a distinction between you, the conscious driver of the bus, and the passengers you carry. You have room on the bus for them. You accept them. You defuse from them. But then you turn your eyes back to the road and connect with that which you really value. You drive in that direction. As a result, your life grows a little, and it becomes a little more vital and flexible.