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I was not previously aware of ACT, but as someone who went down a rabbit hole of mindfulness meditation with a side of (secular) Buddhist philosophy, it struck
by haswell 4y ago
I was not previously aware of ACT, but as someone who went down a rabbit hole of mindfulness meditation with a side of (secular) Buddhist philosophy, it struck me how similar some aspects of this are. In particular, the focus on aversion and the realization that aversion is usually worse than whatever pain is involved in the thing we’re avoiding.
Going down this particular path has been life changing as someone who grew up in an environment that essentially conditioned me to default to aversion/avoidance, a default that culminated in a pretty big burnout.
Realizing that aversion/avoidance was almost always much worse than the thing I was avoiding was a major aha moment, and realizing that this could be corrected is when my life started changing.
Whether it’s ACT or some form of mindfulness+related philosophy, I can’t recommend this kind of internal exploration enough. The associated mental shifts are like freeing up numerous processor cores that were previously consumed by unhelpful thoughts and feelings.
Mindfulness meditation was the tool that made this go from something that I knew intellectually, to something I could observe directly within myself. Once you can see these things clearly, changing them becomes far easier.
- wintermutestwin 4y agoI agree with the similarity. ACT has the advantage of being science-based rather than inspiring so many to LARP enlightenment.
- sfink 4y agoThere are a lot of traditional paths to life cultivation that have a greater weight of evidence behind them than anything tested by 20th or 21st century science. Sure, it hard to know what of that evidence is real, but please let me know when modern-day science has solved that problem. Scientific processes today are far worse than one might realize. Yes, I'm somewhat defending my own particular branch (which I doubt is innately superior to many others, fwiw). But it was the LARPing enlightenment comment that caught my eye: it is absolutely a thing, and it shows up plenty in both traditional and "science-based" methods. But my personal experience is that once you get far enough into something to start to understand what enlightenment would actually require, it becomes a lot less appealing of a target. I'm sure it would be great, but boy howdy it requires a lot of uncomfortable work. I just want to live better and feel better, dammit. You can often sort out the posers from the real life cultivators by enthusiastically bringing up enlightenment. The real people will be the ones who (figuratively) roll their eyes. If they're further along, it will be done in a very polite, understanding, and non-judgemental sort of way. "I was once like you, grasshopper. And I still am."
- scubbo 4y agoGlad I wasn't the only one that saw that! Right up until the "Clear Values" section, I was finding this all very reminiscent of advice I'd received from Ten Percent Happier / Headspace! Which is not, to be clear, criticism or belittlement - indeed, when different groups with different motivations or backgrounds independently hit on similar approaches, that's probably a sign that there's something to it...