This week we’ll be dipping into an acceptance practice. Acceptance of experience as it happens is crucial to increasing equanimity in the face of phenomena and thus to making progress with one’s insight practice.
The more we learn to embrace, absorb and accept all experience as it manifests, the less we seek to grasp on to and/or avoid it.
Acceptance is closely tied to the second of the three characteristics (impermanence, unsatisfaction and no-self) which fuel insight, unsatisfaction (suffering). Not turning away from what’s happening and noticing that phenomena do not satisfy results in a release or letting go which decreases suffering through reducing mental contraction.
As an added bonus, that decreased contraction can brighten our perceptual clarity in the process.
