This week, I’ve been mulling over the bodhisattva Guanyin, also known as the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion. I’ve been rambling a bit about how to use the mythology of Guanyin as an archetype—a symbol and model of the deep and inclusive empathy that writers need.
On this Tips for Writers Thursday, I’m offering this exercise from Writing as a Sacred Path as a technique for growing empathy, even in the face of discord and conflict.
Radical Acceptance
If writers are the voice of the human experience, then we must be open to all of its manifestations. Radical acceptance is an openness to all people even when their behavior is troubling or unacceptable. Radical acceptance is not easy. Only a saint could practice it all the time. But cultivating it can open you to the great variety of human experience and allow you to write about the world without the encumbrance of anger and disapproval.
This exercise focuses on individuals or groups we are angry with or frustrated by. It starts with conflict. It entails a series of steps by which we can write ourselves to acceptance.
1. To begin, write your feelings about the person you are having problems with. Take as much time as you need. Be honest. Don’t worry about being tactful or even fair. This is for you to vent. Allow yourself to feel upset as you write. Don’t hold back.
2. Identify key elements. After you’ve written your feelings, take a break. Then read what you wrote. Underline phrases that seem particularly significant. Pay attention to them. Look for patterns. You may find your feelings were not what you thought: perhaps you’re not as angry as you imagined, or you’re just using anger to cover up hurt. But it’s all right if you find what you expected to find.
3. Create an inventory of your feelings. Identify and name your emotions. On a separate sheet of paper, write each emotion out as a single sentence: “I am sad.” “I am enraged.” “I feel . . . (excluded, intruded upon, violated, put down, neglected, etc.) Just state your feelings here: Don’t editorialize or explain. After each statement, leave space for more.
4. Look for causes. Go back to the statements you made in # 3. Add to each one by stating the cause of your emotions. “I am angry because my neighbor filed a complaint about my dog barking.” “I feel hurt because my father snapped at me.” Try to keep your statement to a single sentence—don’t get tangled in explanations or judgments. And don’t place blame. Write, “I am angry because my son was caught defacing property,” not “I am angry because my ungrateful, immature son has disappointed me again.”
5. Identify your wishes. Go back to each of your statements again. This time, write what you wish. “I feel hurt because my father snapped at me. I wish he would be more sensitive, speak more gently, and listen more closely to what I say.”
6. Do a reality check. For the final addition to our feeling statements, we are going to remind ourselves that wishes are wishes: they aren’t demands we can make of the universe, and they aren’t things we can make happen. We aren’t negating our wishes here—they’re still what we would like to be true—but we affirm that they are, after all, wishes. In the end you will have something like:
I am hurt because my father snapped at me. I wish he were more sensitive to my feelings, but I acknowledge that he often forgets that others might be hurt by his words. I realize that he has always had difficulty putting himself in other people’s shoes.
One of the things this final step does is help us recognize what we can’t change and what we can. As someone who often feels angry over things that happened long ago, I need this kind of reality check: Once I remind myself that there’s nothing I can do about things that happened to me in middle school (or even last year), I can step away from the anger and gain some perspective.
Radical acceptance does not mean you approve of the behavior, and it doesn’t mean you don’t take steps to remedy the situation, if you can. Rather, it brings the clarity we need to act effectively. It helps us identify the true nature of our feelings and their source. And it eases our pain by helping us realize that the world cannot always be the way we wish.
For writers, radical acceptance is essential. It helps us expand the scope of our writing by keeping us open to a wide variety of ideas and by allowing us to view even activities we disapprove of with a clear eye. By helping us see beyond our own perspectives to the motivations and feelings of other people, radical acceptance enables us to create deeper, more insightful work.