Mindfulness and acceptance-based therapy

Much of what hurts is not the feeling itself but the fight against it: the second layer of anxiety about being anxious, the shame about being sad, the exhausting effort to not think about something. Mindfulness-based approaches train a different relationship with your inner experience: noticing it, allowing it, and choosing what to do next based on what matters to you rather than on what you're trying to escape.

This isn't passivity, and it isn't meditation for its own sake. In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which many of our clinicians use, the point of acceptance is to free up the energy you were spending on avoidance and put it toward a life you actually want.