The Path to 'Radical Acceptance,' with Dr. Jenna Glover

(mouse clicks) (bright jingle) Headspace Studio. Hey everyone. I'm Dr. Jenna Glover, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and a Tuesday of Pride Week. This week is all about how to tap into a more flexible mindset called dialectical thinking, the idea that two opposing thoughts can coexist. It can help you navigate a complicated world, and is especially helpful for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Today we're gonna talk about how mental flexibility can help us with extreme emotions like hurt or even hate, and how getting to a place of what we call radical acceptance can lead to healing. Radical acceptance is the concept of fully and completely acknowledging reality as it is in the current moment. An example of an everyday aspect of radical acceptance is being stuck in traffic. Often when we're in traffic and we have somewhere that we need to be, we start to feel really stressed and angry, and this continues to grow and to build. There's absolutely nothing we can do to change the situation. Radical acceptance allows us to take a deep breath, to acknowledge the frustration of not being able to be at our destination on time, and then we can relax and accept the situation as it is without causing ourself additional distress or suffering. Dialectical thinking is really helpful for radical acceptance because it helps us acknowledge that two things that seem opposite can be true. I hate the way that this situation is right now, and the situation is the way it is. There's nothing I can do about it. It allows us to move into that more flexible place of, it's like this right now. Radical acceptance is something that we can practice on a small and large scale. For example, during my first faculty position, I worked in an area where there was a religious group that would stand out on the corner of the university that I was a faculty member, and they held up signs that had derogatory statements about the LGBTQ+ community. Every single day I would have to see them standing there with their signs, yelling, things of hate, and each day as I walked into work, I realized how angry and upset I was and that it was affecting me personally. One of my favorite sayings that have been attributed to the Buddha is that anger is like holding a hot coal in your hand with the intention of throwing it at someone. And radical acceptance really made me understand the beauty of the sentiment, that the anger that I was holding, although valid and justified, was not helping me, and I could change the way that I went to work or I could take a deep breath and say they've chosen to use their time that way. I choose to use my time to focus on love and encouraging and supporting other people, and radical acceptance unlocked that for me. One important way to put...